Was hoping it was a B-21 Raider.
Stealth bomber in flight on Google Maps
291–300 of 390 posts
Re: Stealth bomber in flight on Google Maps
#292Interesting how the three separate R/G/B images are taken independently a few ~seconds~ milliseconds apart, with a different color filter placed over the image sensor. I assume this is to maximize resolution, since no Bayer interpolation [0] is needed to demosaic the output of a traditional image sensor that integrates the color filters onto the sensor pixels themselves. As these satellites are not intended to photog…
Interesting. A search for those gradients could help find all fast moving objects in the satellite images.
/subscribe
Re: Stealth bomber in flight on Google Maps
#293Earlier quoted context omitted.
How low are these satellites? I wouldn't expect the altitude of a plane to be any significant proportion of the altitude of a satellite.
The satellites are probably greater than 400 km altitude, or so, while the plane is probably 10 km. The plane is in the same rough order of magnitude as really tall mountains, which the satellite is presumably designed to compensate for, so I agree with your general assessment.
The shadow is 750 m away and the sun is about 15 degrees off noon, so the B2 altitude is roughly 3 km. Cousin comment says the satellite altitude is 614 km, so I wouldn't expect parallax effects to be dominant. This is also evidenced by the fact that both the plane and ground are in focus and the plane is measured to be 70 feet long in google maps, which is what it is specified to be in reality.
Re: Stealth bomber in flight on Google Maps
#294it looks neat. so much to learn in this thread about satellite imagery and calculations.
it makes sense to use crowdsourcung to watch earth with real-time satellite imagery, and later augment it with machine learning to find potentially interesting objects.
I would be more excited with UFO findings, or a redbull base jumper, or proverbial superman/ironman flying.
Re: Stealth bomber in flight on Google Maps
#295Artist James Bridle calls them "Rainbow planes" and has used this in his art. Rainbow Plane 002: Kiev. October 29, 2014: https://booktwo.org/notebook/rainbow-plane-002-kiev/ Rainbow Planes: https://www.flickr.com/photos/stml/sets/72157637938061015/
It's interesting how some satellites take the alpha channel pic before the RGB channels, and some do it after. The lag also changes. Alpha & RGB have similar lags for some, but alpha is way off on others.
What does alpha channel mean in this context? Usually it means transparency but how would you take a picture of that?
Re: Stealth bomber in flight on Google Maps
#296Earlier quoted context omitted.
https://www.nro.gov/
What an awful picture of the NRO Director. Surely they have plenty of experience in photography in less than ideal conditions. So why have this photo as the first thing I can see on their website?
It’s so bad it seems unlikely it isn’t a joke. I mean look at their mission patches: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_NRO_launches
Re: Stealth bomber in flight on Google Maps
#297Earlier quoted context omitted.
These are pushbroom linear sensors stacked up in the focal plane. The spectral channels are physically separated by larger distance than neighboring pixels in a Bayer grid. There is a time delay between each channel sweeping over the same location that gets corrected when the final imagery is aligned. The moving plane at altitude violates assumption of a static scene and exposes the scanning behavior.
For anyone wondering about what a pushboom sensor is - http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.72.... Basically a 1D sensor that acquires a 2D image because the camera itself is moving. In this case, I'd imagine that there are 3 such sensors for RGB.
> Basically a 1D sensor that acquires a 2D image because the camera itself is moving.
Or a static camera and a moving subject. This same style of camera is used for "photo finishes" in races. The camera is literally the finish line, and the the first pixel to "cross the line" is the winner.
Re: Stealth bomber in flight on Google Maps
#298Interesting how the three separate R/G/B images are taken independently a few ~seconds~ milliseconds apart, with a different color filter placed over the image sensor. I assume this is to maximize resolution, since no Bayer interpolation [0] is needed to demosaic the output of a traditional image sensor that integrates the color filters onto the sensor pixels themselves. As these satellites are not intended to photog…
These are pushbroom linear sensors stacked up in the focal plane. The spectral channels are physically separated by larger distance than neighboring pixels in a Bayer grid. There is a time delay between each channel sweeping over the same location that gets corrected when the final imagery is aligned. The moving plane at altitude violates assumption of a static scene and exposes the scanning behavior.
The B2 bomber photo isn't from a push boom sensor, because it would be distorted since it's moving relative to the camera. This would manifest itself as a shear along the motion vector . There is no shear in this photo, only spectral bands.
I've spent a number of years doing image orthorectification, and satellite imagery post-processing, then also worked on Google Earth and Google Maps, so I can tell you precisely what happened. This is a satellite image from a satellite which photographs different spectra at different times. There isn't enough parallax at typical orbital distance for this much displacement to come from multiple cameras. Looking at some parked cars, this looks like 20-30cm resolution per pixel, which is consistent with the newer earth imaging satellites.
Google Earth made a blog post about this a while ago (https://www.gearthblog.com/blog/archives/2015/03/planes-flig...)
Re: Stealth bomber in flight on Google Maps
#299Artist James Bridle calls them "Rainbow planes" and has used this in his art. Rainbow Plane 002: Kiev. October 29, 2014: https://booktwo.org/notebook/rainbow-plane-002-kiev/ Rainbow Planes: https://www.flickr.com/photos/stml/sets/72157637938061015/
It's interesting how some satellites take the alpha channel pic before the RGB channels, and some do it after. The lag also changes. Alpha & RGB have similar lags for some, but alpha is way off on others.
Do you mean luminance? Alpha usually refers to the transparency channel in an RGBA image.
Whereas I believe you're describing more of a YUV setup
Re: Stealth bomber in flight on Google Maps
#300Earlier quoted context omitted.
These are pushbroom linear sensors stacked up in the focal plane. The spectral channels are physically separated by larger distance than neighboring pixels in a Bayer grid. There is a time delay between each channel sweeping over the same location that gets corrected when the final imagery is aligned. The moving plane at altitude violates assumption of a static scene and exposes the scanning behavior.
The B2 bomber photo isn't from a push boom sensor, because it would be distorted since it's moving relative to the camera. This would manifest itself as a shear along the motion vector . There is no shear in this photo, only spectral bands. I've spent a number of years doing image orthorectification, and satellite imagery post-processing, then also worked on Google Earth and Google Maps, so I can tell you precisely w…
Shame we don't know what the delay between spectra is, would be fun to work out how fast the plane is traveling.