fivemack: (Default)
Tom Womack ([personal profile] fivemack) wrote2009-08-25 04:07 pm

All the satellite pictures you can eat

http://srrs.chelys.it/en/

has images from MERIS (a conventional optical satellite with about 300 metres per pixel resolution) and also ASAR (a synthetic-aperture radar; 150 metre resolution - great for terrain, cities show up as clusters of bright dots wherever a roof happens to be at the right angle to reflect the radar specularly).

Most of the images have attached KML files, so may show up usefully in Google Earth.

I haven't seen a reasonable gallery of SAR images before. This example (3MB, 4864x7425 JPEG) is a swathe across the north-west corner of South Island in New Zealand; lovely crinkly edges.

http://www.eosnap.com/ is somewhere between a collection of press releases and a blog; it has some more-processed products from the satellite. http://www.eosnap.com/?page_id=2668#asar points to this lovely mosaic of Italy, Slovenia and the Croatian coast (16640x14592 (!!) JPEG) (2080x1824 version)
simont: A picture of me in 2016 (Default)

[personal profile] simont 2009-08-25 03:38 pm (UTC)(link)
On a vaguely vaguely related note, Gareth turned up http://www.mylovedone.com/IMaGe/Monograph1/PlatonicSolids.html this morning, which (among a great deal of very strange stuff) includes details of a regular tetrahedron inscribed in the Earth such that all four vertices are on land.
ext_8103: (Default)

[identity profile] ewx.livejournal.com 2009-08-25 07:08 pm (UTC)(link)

Out of curiosity I tried looking at the huge JPEG in a few ways.

Linux Firefox 3.0.6 on a 2GB machine managed to download it and zoom in but with endless swapping; unusable but FF eventually recovered when I closed the tab.

Mac Firefox 3.5.2 on a 6GB machine started to display it but beachballed about 20% of the way in, and eventually I killed it.

Preview.app on a copy downloaded separately had no trouble displaying it, zooming, navigating etc. A bit sluggish but still usable.

Firefox seriously needs to get a grip l-)