You should be able to see Sean Miller on that northern Africa encampment pretty easily now.
In case anyone is wondering - this appears to be reference to this scene from Patriot Games:
Planes Landing in Beijing: Video from Space
21–30 of 72 posts
Re: Planes Landing in Beijing: Video from Space
#22would LOVE to have a developer API to skybox. The things one could do!
Re: Planes Landing in Beijing: Video from Space
#23I am more amazed at the lack of smog blocking visibility. Disclaimer: I'm Chinese and I love Beijing as a city, on a good day it's about as clean as LA and on a bad day its...well you can barely see airport terminal when you land.
In LA at least, smog goes to about 5000ft to the inversion layer. Looking vertically through that distance you get much better visibility vs looking horizontally through miles of smog. You can notice the effect looking out a plane window at cruise altitude compared to landing and takeoff.
Re: Planes Landing in Beijing: Video from Space
#24There are some hard, unforgiving physical limits on resolution of photographs from orbit, even with digital correction of the images. For one thing, the camera is necessarily far away, and moving fast at the same time.[1] I was able to follow the specific link just kindly submitted here, which of course shows a rather large object (a commercial airliner). The satellite company's image gallery[2] compares quite favora…
The first link you provided also brings up several interesting implications about continuous surveillance from space. The first is that it is technically possible, but economically difficult. Getting ~5000 high resolution satellites in LEO is not really all that much more difficult than getting 1, it's a matter of scale. But getting funding to put that number up is virtually impossible. Even smallsats and other swarm…
Bandwidth issues are alleviated by directional antennae, right?
Re: Planes Landing in Beijing: Video from Space
#25Re: Planes Landing in Beijing: Video from Space
#26There are some hard, unforgiving physical limits on resolution of photographs from orbit, even with digital correction of the images. For one thing, the camera is necessarily far away, and moving fast at the same time.[1] I was able to follow the specific link just kindly submitted here, which of course shows a rather large object (a commercial airliner). The satellite company's image gallery[2] compares quite favora…
The Skybox link has 2 great videos (footage is mostly the same, one is edited with "need more crosshairs"), for those who haven't seen them yet.
http://www.firstimagery.skybox.com/hd-video/2014/2/11/lookin...
youtube/ vimeo direct:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fCrB1t8MncY&hd=1 https://vimeo.com/82644547
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BsW6IGc4tt0&hd=1 https://vimeo.com/86196806
Re: Planes Landing in Beijing: Video from Space
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
Paid for with Afghan Heroin.
You wouldn't use drug money for spy satellites, they're happily paid for by Congress. Drug money's for stuff you don't want tied back to the organization - assassinations, corruption, etc.
That's right. see: The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade by Alfred W. McCoy for more details.
Re: Planes Landing in Beijing: Video from Space
#28I am more amazed at the lack of smog blocking visibility. Disclaimer: I'm Chinese and I love Beijing as a city, on a good day it's about as clean as LA and on a bad day its...well you can barely see airport terminal when you land.
It could be using a wavelengths that go through smog.
Re: Planes Landing in Beijing: Video from Space
#29They seem to be careful not to show a large object like a plane crossing the "seams" that appear in the video (similar to the seams in satellite imagery on maps where they've patched together data from multiple passes / satellites). When you see the cars on the freeway they seem to disappear at the seams. Does the camera have to be focused on an area the size of the blocks they show? This is still very impressive - I don't mean to downplay the technical achievement, but I'm just trying to get a realistic sense of where the technology is at. I suspect this is video overlaid on static images.
Re: Planes Landing in Beijing: Video from Space
#30I am more amazed at the lack of smog blocking visibility. Disclaimer: I'm Chinese and I love Beijing as a city, on a good day it's about as clean as LA and on a bad day its...well you can barely see airport terminal when you land.
In LA at least, smog goes to about 5000ft to the inversion layer. Looking vertically through that distance you get much better visibility vs looking horizontally through miles of smog. You can notice the effect looking out a plane window at cruise altitude compared to landing and takeoff.
Exactly. This is why distant city lights often twinkle even more than stars do: there’s more atmosphere between you and them than between you and the stars.
Another effect here is that Skybox’s video uses the pan band, which includes infrared to 900 nm[0], and smog is usually pretty transparent in NIR, depending.
0. http://skybox.com/uploads/10/08/imageryandvideospecsheet.pdf
And a third important factor is that smog is very diffuse (by definition: otherwise you call it a smoke plume), so if you have the bit depth you can just increase contrast until you get a good image.
(I work at Mapbox on satellite imagery, but wasn’t involved with this particular blog post; what I’m saying here is stuff that people in remote sensing Just Know.)