Hey, this is neat

[CHARLIE]

To view pictures of the earth from different satillites, click on this link:

http://www.fourmilab.ch/earthview/satellite.html

You can zoom in and zoom farther out.  Lights on at night are neat. On one picture, half the world was dark with lights on and the other half was still daylight.  Somehow you can see the mountains and ridges in the ocean too. That's cool

[Roxie]

That is so awesome!  According to the BrasilSatB1, the lights are coming on in America!  Thank you for sharing that Charlie!
 8)

[SwampDonkey]

Thanks to radar imagery you can see through water and clouds. Landsat radar imagery is used by many forestry companies and Universities. I remember using a program at University that used ASCII (alpha-numeric and special characters)  art instead of color pixels to render the images. The course was on Remote Scensing and Aerial Photo Interpretation. An excellent text on the subject is 'Remote Sensing and Image Interpretation' by Thomas Lillesand and Ralph Kiefer. In that book there are even Tree ID keys to identify certain tree species, also a method to interpret tree volumes by looking at aerial photos. This method is more of an art, than a science. ;)

cheers

[Roxie]

Gosh, Swamp Donkey.  I think we just demonstrated the phenominal diversity found on the forum.  I was gazing in child-like wonder, and you were thinking pixels vs. alpha numeric in aerial photographic interpretation.   :D

[SwampDonkey]

 :D :D :D

Roxie, I was using the LandSat view on that site to see the lights over New Brunswick, I could follow the Saint John River Valley, the capital city and 2 other southern cities in the province. I was kinda upside down there for awhile, trying to get away from the Asia and the Mediterranian, panned across the UK and Ireland then Newfoundland came into view, kept going and whalla. :D :D

[Stephen_Wiley]

When I first looked it showed us in the dark...with a definite demarcation line up and down the West Coast.

As the light began to appear closer to home, I looked out my skylight  sure enough..........here comes da sun  8)

[Paschale]

Thanks for the site, Charlie--very cool stuff.

I'm wondering if these are actual images, or rather computer graphic representations of what each satellite is seeing "virtually."  The thing that I was struck with is that I don't see any clouds on any of the images.   ???  I was trying to see the tropics, and see that miserable Jeanne.   >:(

[Wife]

Thanks for the site charlie.
i got to show my 4 year old daughter where I will be heading to tomorrow morning, was hard finding us on little old New Zealand in the dark though.  :D
She just has one question.....why dont they come here to see the sawmill? it's close enough :
See you guys soon, Chris

[Brian_Bailey]

Thanks for the link Charlie!  

It's been interesting watching the line of darkness slowly approaching the east coast from echostar 8.

[CHARLIE]

Thanks to radar imagery you can see through water and clouds. Landsat radar imagery is used by many forestry companies and Universities.

Paschale, I think SwampDonkey explains the "No Cloud" in his post.  They are supposed to be real images from the the satellites.  There sure are a bunch of them up there. How can they shoot up a Space Shuttle without getting hit by one?

[SwampDonkey]

I was incorrect about the sensors onboard LandSat. There are 3 types of sensors which detect infra-red energy.

mulispectral scanner (MSS) : it detects a number of narrow spectral bands simultaneously from ultraviolet, visible, near-IR, mid-IR and thermal-IR

thematic mapper (TM): detects blue, green, red, near-IR, Mid-IR, Thermal-IR, and mid-IR, with much improved spatial resolution (spectoral and radiometric) over the MSS system. Useful for geologic mapping.

RBV: green, red, near infrared sensor. Three television-like cameras which view the same 185x185 km simultaneously. Images are exposed by a shutter and stored on a photosensitive surface within the camera, not film. This surface is scanned by an internal electron beam to produce a video signal like a tv camera. Greater catographic fidelity than MSS. Tic marked accurately placed on the images help in geometric correction of the imagery.

Here is a Thematic Mapper image from Landsat of Fredericton, New Brunswick.
http://www.ccrs.nrcan.gc.ca/ccrs/learn/tour/12/12nb_e.html

There ya have it

[Roxie]

I'm glad you cleared that up, Swamp Donkey.  I was about to call you on it!   :D :D :D :D

[SwampDonkey]

Its been 15 years since I studied that stuff, and if you don't make use of that knowledge its soon forgotten. So I had to do some consultation with Lillesand and Kiefer to get it right. ;) :D :D

[iain]

BAM one cool site on the desk top
dont forget to wind the pixel image size to the max your system can go slows down a bit but more detail
i like the nasa clean up? button

 moocho good link


 iain