Shapes we make, seen from the sky

Look from the above at the shapes and geometry we use for cities, blocks, roads, fields, and the like, and you start to get the repeating patterns. Páraic McGloughlin and Pearse McGloughlin highlight these patterns and their connectedness in Arena by stringing together Google Earth images.

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SimCity-like views using satellite imagery

Maps typically show a view from straight above, which is good for navigation and to see regional patterns over large areas. However, missing out on the extra dimension of height can mean missing out on context. Robert Simmon for Planet Labs shows off some work in getting the less abstract perspective at a large scale.

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A daily high-resolution image of Earth

Planet monitors Earth with hundreds of satellites, and after six years, they’ve built out their pipeline to piece together a full image on the daily.

At Planet, we’ve been pursuing Mission 1: to image the entire Earth’s landmass every day. I couldn’t be more excited to announce that we have achieved our founding mission.

Six years ago, our team started in a garage in Cupertino. Mission 1 was the north star: we needed to build the satellites and systems, secure the launches, bring down the data to capture a daily image of the planet at high resolution, and make it easy to access for anyone. It became the heart and soul of our company and guiding light for Planeteers.

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Landsat satellite imagery browser

Downloading and viewing satellite imagery is a bit of a process. There are lot of images, and pictures aren’t taken in the exact same spot (because they’re taken from a satellite). The Landsat Viewer makes the viewing a bit easier. Just click and drag the area, select the source, and you’re off. There may or may not be wizardry involved.

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California looks green again

In case you didn’t hear, California had a bit of a drought problem for the past few years. We complained about not enough rain constantly, and we finally got a lot of it this year. Now we complain that there’s too much rain (because you know, we have to restore balance). On the upside, the state looks a lot greener and less barren these days. David Yanofsky for Quartz has got your satellite imagery right here.

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Detailed time-lapse of everywhere on Earth

A few years back, Google released a time-lapse feature in Google Earth that let you see change through satellite imagery. They updated the feature last week. It’s more detailed and higher resolution than the first version, based on the pixels from about five million images.

We took the best of all those pixels to create 33 images of the entire planet, one for each year. We then encoded these new 3.95 terapixel global images into just over 25,000,000 overlapping multi-resolution video tiles, made interactively explorable by Carnegie Mellon CREATE Lab’s Time Machine library, a technology for creating and viewing zoomable and pannable timelapses over space and time.

Pretty cool to see my own neighborhood develop into what it is today.

Give it a go.

Update: See also The New York Times’ take on some of the water bodies around the world, using the same data.

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Visualizing the U.S.-Mexican border

the-wall

There’s been a lot of talk about building a wall at the U.S.-Mexican border lately. Seems straightforward enough, right? Just put some bricks up and be done with it. Well, it’s not really that easy, just from a logistics standpoint. Nevermind the politics. Josh Begley for the Intercept grabbed satellite images for the 1,954 miles of boundary line and then strung together the 200,000 images in a time-lapse to show the scale of what “build that wall” means.

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Finding the wet princes of Bel Air

Wet princes of Bel Air

In case you didn’t know, there’s a drought here in California so there are rules for when you can and can’t water your grass and plants. Not everyone adheres to those rules though. And some households really don’t follow the rules. In Los Angeles, or more specifically, Bel Air, there are a handful of households using millions of gallons per year. Michael Corey and Lance Williams for Reveal used satellite data to guess which ones.

I mainly share this though for the title of their post that explains how they did it: Now this is a story all about how we found the Wet Princes of Bel Air. Genius.

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Oil fires in Iraq seen from above

Iraq oil

Though far away, there’s still a lot you can see, as the NASA Earth Observatory notes:

On August 17, 2016, the Operational Land Imager (OLI) on Landsat 8 acquired an image (above) of dense smoke plumes roughly 50 kilometers (30 miles) south of Mosul. There appear to be multiple sources of fire, most likely oil wells from the Qayyarah oil field. The images in the grid below show the plumes changing direction and thickness since they were first spotted by Landsat 8 on June 14.

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Piecing together satellite images

Piecing together satellite images

You might think piecing together satellite imagery is a straightforward task of lining up latitude and longitude points. But if you think that, you haven’t actually worked with these things. David Yanofsky, part of the Quartz Things Team, describes how he processes satellite images for one coherent image and how you can to.

He starts at downloading the data, moves into stitching together a mosaic, and then adjusting the color so that everything is smooth and continuous.

Finished workflow on GitHub.

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