Caught by Satellite

12 responses to “Caught by Satellite”

1. 

   jurvetson

   Nov 12, 2013 at 3:47 am

   Different sensor types:
   

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2. 

   jhapeman

   Nov 12, 2013 at 4:08 am

   Excellent.

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3. 

   andyi

   Nov 12, 2013 at 5:55 am

   I bet it’d be possible to calculate the speed of the plane…

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4. 

   jhapeman

   Nov 12, 2013 at 1:19 pm

   [http://www.flickr.com/photos/andyi] Possible, but tricky without knowing more about the orbital velocity of the satellite. You could also calculate the altitude of the plane.

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5. 

   Ray Skwire

   Nov 12, 2013 at 2:11 pm

   There’s an entire group on Google forums that dedicates itself to finding satellite images of captured aircraft.

   It’s actually kind of fun, if you don’t mind scanning for hours. I’ve found a few myself that hadn’t been documented before.

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6. 

   jurvetson

   Nov 12, 2013 at 5:32 pm

   Or, finding satellite trackers by aircraft…

   

   [http://www.flickr.com/photos/andyi] and [http://www.flickr.com/photos/jhapeman] — You could analyze the foliage and if the imagery appears to be at the 50cm legal limit for civilian sats (but probably closer to the more affordable 1 meter resolution), and knowing who Google buys from, you could deduce the orbital altitude, which give you the scanner speed. Each of R,G,B is already registered to a fixed ground point, so the orbital inclination (i.e., angle of passage at this latitude) and rotation of Earth can be ignored, and each color band on the plane is captured by a successive linear sensor overhead. Knowing the wing width for this plane, you can calculate the inter-band distance. We are nearly over the plane, so the angular calculations are easier… and its altitude relative to the ground (on approach to SFO) is a small correction to the inter-object distance estimate….

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7. 

   jurvetson

   Nov 12, 2013 at 9:03 pm

   I pulled it up on my Mac and zoomed in… Looks pretty cool. You can even see the turbulent thermal trails from the engines

   

   Is that 4th-band, looking like an outline, near-IR?

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8. 

   scleroplex

   Nov 12, 2013 at 11:23 pm

   super!
   this is what my father has been doing from 1973 – satellite photogrammetry 🙂

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9. 

   Seldom Scene Photography

   Nov 13, 2013 at 3:45 am

   Excellent — love the near-IR aircraft outline!

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10. 

    brentdanley

    Nov 29, 2013 at 3:25 pm

    Is the battery indicator in the upper-left of the display showing vehicle charge?

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11. 

    jurvetson

    Nov 29, 2013 at 7:37 pm

    [http://www.flickr.com/photos/brentdanley] – yes, and there is a more informative display in the center console with range (and you can display a graph of all kinds of battery information if you want max info)

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12. 

    brentdanley

    Nov 30, 2013 at 1:47 am

    [http://www.flickr.com/photos/jurvetson] Thanks. Are there popups at 20% and 10% like in iOS? 😉

    Reply