A New Kind of Landscape Photography | Hacker News Reader

A New Kind of Landscape Photography

theatlantic.com

124 pointscoloneltcb24 comments

Has anyone tried using DigitalGlobe (the service that's used in the OP) for on-demand photography? Their landing page [1] provides several call-to-actions: download Silverlight to see an interactive demo, set up a live demo, or regular Contact Us form. They apparently have a partnership with CartoDB [2], which states that day-of photos can be requested (at $30/km2) and is integrated to their API -- but then states it's for Enterprise clients only (though later in the page, says "Anyone can access this data").

I guess there's probably not a service that just lets you fill out an online form and pay by credit card to get an image on demand, but would like something a little more frictionless than having to meet with a salesperson when I already know exactly what I want to try out.

[1] https://www.digitalglobe.com/products/spatial-on-demand#feat...

[2] https://cartodb.com/cartodb-for/satellite-aerial-image/

We looked into DigitalGlobe a while back. They are the best provider of satellite imagery we could find, but there are a lot of limitations. First, you really cannot get on demand imagery. If you wanted the same picture take every day for months or years. They couldn't do it. Second, the costs were too high. Even looking at their startup package it felt like we were a small town band talking to a major record label.

My expectation is that drones will be a much better technology. Unless what you are interested in is imagery of North Korea, Russia, or some remote area in Africa in which case pay up and these guys/gals can do it.

So, in the end how much does it really cost, and how hard is it to acquire the service?

One alternative, which I haven't tried either is Planet Labs [1]. They use dozens of tiny satellites instead of a few big ones, and their quality is not yet up to DigitalGlobe, but they are a startup and hopefully are much more open to different use cases.

[1] https://www.planet.com/

Thanks for the link, unfortunately all I see is a contact sales button.

That is not Crested Butte - that is Leadville

Source: https://www.google.com/maps/@39.2391647,-106.2825792,23874m/...

I was surprised at how easy it was to identify almost everything in the photo and even then Crested Butte stuck out. Weird mistake to make. The only thing that stuck out more (for me) was South Park, which I could identify even in the thumbnail image in the article.

Anyway, completely love the image and would also love to see one pointing a bit more southerly to capture the Sangre De Cristo's and the Great Sand Dunes.

That picture kind of breaks my sense of perception. When I first looked at it, I entirely mis-categorized the scale, and thinking it was looking North from San Bernadino, I was able to place the lakes and landmarks in order for it all to fit, and it pretty much worked, my mind easing over unrecognized characteristics as places I'd not been.

Then I read the article.

I had the opposite reaction. I tried to convince myself that I couldn't be recognizing the landscape in the vast area even though I did. I zoomed in and immediately recognized the area of Colorado where I work. I saw the highway I drive every day, major lakes, hogbacks, etc. If the clouds weren't in the way,I think I could have even found my neighborhood.

I believe that one of the reasons that it looks strange to us is that the image is captured using a "push broom scanner," where the satellite captures one line of the image at a time as it flies above the Earth, so the usual rules of perspective do not apply. The image is the same geographical width at the bottom as is it at the top.

Also known as isometric projection. Although, because the telescope has a such a small field of view, perspective projection would give virtually the same image.

Right. It seems like it's essentially an object-space telecentric view (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecentric_lens).

Having hiked, biked, camped, and lived in many of the areas in that photo, looking at this gives me a deep sense of familiarity, yet still offers a completely unique perspective. Thanks for sharing this!

Absolutely breathtaking. It's like standing on an enormous mountain.

One app I noticed recently might be of interest - "SpyMeSat". Give it a location, and it'll show you a list of forthcoming imaging opportunities from several satellites. Tap on any of them, and you get to see further information on its capabilities, including available spatial resolution. I haven't tried purchasing any images, but the prices look quite sane - £8 for 1 square km, £15 for 4 sq.km. Whether more interesting angles are available, as in the article, or just the more familiar "overhead" flat view, I can't tell.

https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/spymesat/id691290387?mt=8

Wow, astounding! I want the full-resolution version!

Here is what you get having stitched the images from the Leaflet frame:

PNG version (242.43 MB): https://www.dropbox.com/s/x25useoyup5o6zh/final.png?dl=0

JPEG version (48.35 MB): https://www.dropbox.com/s/qbj0luob0jmlj5v/jpeg.jpg?dl=0

Dimensions are 10644 by 13305.

Think the closest you can get to that is the direct iframe at http://www.theatlantic.com/media/interactives/2015/11/colora... (leaflet page.)

You could download all the images from http://www.theatlantic.com//media/interactives/2015/11/color... to http://www.theatlantic.com//media/interactives/2015/11/color...

I got it doing this: https://gist.github.com/grownseed/0c7efcacd2cbaa0056e7

Far from clean but does the job :)

And here I expected this to be an article about New Topographics, given that the 40th anniversary of the original show just passed: http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2010/feb/08/new-topo...

The star positioning system is interesting.

By the way, does anybody know a open source lib like the one they are using (zoomify) to display very high resolution images on the web?

That is a large airport.

I wonder how often spy satellites take similar pictures, since they might be more willing to play around to peek around cloud cover, if they really want a particular picture right now.

Having a powerful, private "spy satellite" is really cool, since it puts government-style capabilities in the hands of "ordinary" people (at least, ordinary people with money).

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