No, those aren’t giant ants swarming around the Washington Monument all the way up to the U.S. Capitol Building. This is the first satellite image of the inauguration taken at 11:19 AM EST today by the GeoEye-1 satellite. This is the same satellite that supplies Google with images for Google Maps and Google Earth, so we may see this image show up there one day as well.

All those clumps of people in between the Washington Monument and the Capitol are clustered around Jumbotron screens. The image was taken from 423 miles in space and shows objects as small as a half-meter. Click on the image for a larger view. (I had to compress all the images to put them online). That doesn’t look like two million people. Does it? TechCrunch T-shirt to the first reader to accurately count all the ants.

Below are two cropped images showing more detail: