CORONA Mission
For those not familiar with the CORONA Mission, it was the original US spy satellite programme that operated from 1958-1972 (and was declassified in 1995)....
posted on: Wed, 19 Nov | path: /remote_sensing | permanent link to this entry
NERC FSF
I spent a day this week at the NERC Field Spectroscopy Facility receiving some training in the use of a GER1500 that is being used to study loess profiles....
posted on: Sun, 06 Jul | path: /remote_sensing | permanent link to this entry
Super-duper-Zoom
192.com have launched a beta version of their "Super Zoom" aerial imagery. I saw this on Mapperz last week and thought I would check it out. And yes, the UK is covered at 12.5cm (no surprise there) and central London at 4cm (although their press release doesn't actually state the resolution, the date of acquisition or where the imagery came from)!! The Guardian have a thoughtful piece on the privacy implications. They interviewed 192.com's CEO and note the 4cm resolution, flown during 2007 and licensed from the OS. Anyway, the data itself is amazing and well worth a look.
posted on: Wed, 13 Feb | path: /remote_sensing | permanent link to this entry
NextMap Ireland currently in Edit
InterMap have been busy bees recently as the description of their current and impending imagery elevation products shows....
posted on: Thu, 24 Jan | path: /remote_sensing | permanent link to this entry
Landsat 5 back imaging again
Back in September 2007 the USGS reported problems with Landsat 5's onboard batteries which had caused it to stop imaging. Landsat 5 has proved really rather remarkable, proving very reliable since it started imaging in March 1984 (and completing its 125,000 orbit last year). It still provides Thematic Mapper imagery (at 30m resolution) and, almost single-handedly, has been NASA's "Mission to Planet Earth." Anyway, the USGS happily reports that the fault has been found and imaging is now back online. Testing is continuing to see how the satellite performs.
posted on: Mon, 21 Jan | path: /remote_sensing | permanent link to this entry
Global Mapper
Global Mapper is one of those little pieces of "GIS gems" that many people haven't heard of and should have done....
posted on: Sun, 06 Jan | path: /remote_sensing | permanent link to this entry
Deeply functional!
I was at the at the GRSG's Annual Conference at the Geological Society in London today. This is one of my favourite conferences as it is low key, has commercial and academic members and brings together a wide variety of inter-disciplinary subjects....
posted on: Tue, 18 Dec | path: /remote_sensing | permanent link to this entry
Initial TopSat Data
As part of the availability of TopSat tasking to UK higher education, we had our initial request for three sites in Armenia approved and have just taken delivery of the first of these....
posted on: Fri, 14 Dec | path: /remote_sensing | permanent link to this entry
ASTER G-DEM
ASTER is an experimental sensor that sits onboard NASA's Terra platform and is jointly run by NASA and Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry....
posted on: Wed, 21 Nov | path: /remote_sensing | permanent link to this entry
TopSat Opportunities for UK HE Staff
MIMAS maintain an archive of satellite imagery, primarily of the UK, for most UK HE institutions through the Landmap website....
posted on: Fri, 16 Nov | path: /remote_sensing | permanent link to this entry
Big TIFF is out.
BigTIFF appears to be coming close to an official release. TIFF has been a popular format within geospatial circles for a while because its an open format (although Adobe owns the specification) and there is the open source libtiff library used for reading/writing TIFFs....
posted on: Sun, 28 Oct | path: /remote_sensing | permanent link to this entry
Continuous Rotation Servos
The rig designs I have used for flying my cameras (from kites), all use model aircraft servos (e.g. Hitec, Futaba) to drive the rotation (horizontally) of the vertically pointing camera....
posted on: Fri, 20 Jul | path: /remote_sensing | permanent link to this entry
Fisheye Panoramas Continued
Well it's been a month since my last blog on creating panoramas from fisheye lenses. I had said I would come back to using Hugin to create panoramas, it's just taken longer than I thought!...
posted on: Thu, 19 Jul | path: /remote_sensing | permanent link to this entry
More KAP Testing
I managed to get some testing of the Ultra-light rig this week. As you can see from the photo, we were trialling both the new rig and the stereo mounted cameras....
posted on: Wed, 18 Jul | path: /remote_sensing | permanent link to this entry
RS and ArcMap
I've been doing a little bit of training this week on using ArcGIS for simple image processing and, whilst ERDAS Imagine remains my staple (simply because I'm familiar with it), it's quite beneficial to find new ways of accomplishing old tasks....
posted on: Fri, 13 Jul | path: /remote_sensing | permanent link to this entry
Fisheye Panoramas
Scott Haefner had an interesting idea in combining a fisheye lens with kite aerial photography to create some 360 panoramas....
posted on: Sat, 16 Jun | path: /remote_sensing | permanent link to this entry
Ultra-Light KAP Rig
As a result og my KAP experiences in China, I spent a while thinking about a new ultra-light camera rig....
posted on: Sat, 02 Dec | path: /remote_sensing | permanent link to this entry
Converting IDRISI IMG Files
I had a stack of old IDRISI IMG files that I wanted to look back at a short while ago. I fired up ERDAS Imagine and found that it didn't have a convertor for IDRISI....
posted on: Tue, 19 Sep | path: /remote_sensing | permanent link to this entry
TanDEM-X
An interesting interview in Geoconnexion this month with the Chairman and MD of Infoterra, the commercial operating arm (from a public-private consortium) of TerraSAR-X/TanDEM-X. With launch scheduled for 2009, TanDEM-X is of interest to me as it takes the technology flown as part of the shuttle SIR-C and SRTM missions and develops them further, deploying them as part of a dual-platform. TanDEM-X will deliver a DEM product that has a claimed vertical accuracy of ~2 m and spatial resolution of 12 m. Whilst this is impressive, as TanDEM-X will be a polar orbiting satellite, the entire landmass of the Earth will be imaged within 3 years (i.e. a global DEM).
posted on: Thu, 07 Sep | path: /remote_sensing | permanent link to this entry
KAP: Loch Lomond
I've just returned from two days field work in the small village of Duncryne, just south of Loch Lomond. This was a two-fold trip designed to further test our kite-based remote sensing platform as well as acquire some imagery of an esker deposited during the Younger Dryas. As you can see from the photo the system was working well and managed to combine my second interest, that of Land Rovers. This one is a rather luxurious Discovery TD5; much more comfortable than the old Series 3.
This trip involved some more surveying and we took with us an aged, but faithful and reliable, Kern theodolite/EDM. So some 600 photos and many control points later we had finished the job.
posted on: Tue, 27 Jun | path: /remote_sensing | permanent link to this entry
Google Mars
In between all the legal filings last week, Google somewhat quietly launched Google Mars. And we thought they were content with just global domination; the universe beckons!...
posted on: Mon, 20 Mar | path: /remote_sensing | permanent link to this entry
Buncefield Air Pollution Monitoring
Nobody can have missed the massive explosion (supposedly the largest peacetime fire in Europe) that rocked the Buncefield oil depot in Hemel Hempstead, UK, this week....
posted on: Thu, 15 Dec | path: /remote_sensing | permanent link to this entry
Prosumer camera RAW files
As part of my project exploring the use of kite-based remote sensing I have been using a Nikon D70 to take aerial imagery....
posted on: Sun, 20 Nov | path: /remote_sensing | permanent link to this entry
Inter-planetry remote sensing
I have become increasingly interested in exploring some of the inter-planetry remote sensing data sets, partly a result of the BSc in Earth and Planetry Science which we offer here at Kingston University....
posted on: Sun, 30 Oct | path: /remote_sensing | permanent link to this entry
NEXTMap for NERC Science
An excellent meeting at the British Geological Survey exploring the use of Intermap's NEXTMap DEM product of the UK....
posted on: Fri, 23 Sep | path: /remote_sensing | permanent link to this entry
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