UrtheCast Releases Its First Commercial Videos of Earth 45
schwit1 writes: UrtheCast has released high resolution videos of three Earth cities taken from its camera on ISS. Take a look. The cameras are quite successful in capturing the motion of vehicles on highways and road, which is amazing considering the vibrations that ISS experiences merely from astronaut movements. Quartz reports: "The company plans to offer the imagery in several tiers, from a free video feed on its website to an API that will allow customers, including corporations, governments and individuals, to purchase imagery data from its database or make real-time requests for a look at a given spot on the earth. The cameras scan the ground under the ISS, which tracks the earth between about 51 degrees north and south latitude."
Pretty Cool (Score:2)
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There's no 'e' in urth, or potato.
-dan
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plural potatoes
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Unless I suck at math, that's like...close to one degree of rotation per second at its fastest, to stay pointed at the same spot. Seems pretty crazy to get such good resolution at that speed at that distance.
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The most incredible thing about the filming from that height and orbital speed is that we're really not that surprised. Barely impressed, perhaps.
Poor science... we've set the bar so high.
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That's because, unsurprisingly, the Earth is still fucking huge even if you're 250 miles away, and you can only see something like 40 degrees* of the surface from the ISS at any one time.
*or possibly less, not sure about my calculation
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The ISS goes around the earth at something like 20 times the rate of the Earth's rotatiuon, so you couldn't really show the Earth rotating from the ISS, the natural rotation would be swamped. Someone else does that kind of thing, anyway. [youtube.com]
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...and this. [youtube.com]
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You can particularly see it in the shape of the London Eye, the big wheel at the top of the London video.
Traffic? (Score:2)
Re:Traffic? (Score:5, Insightful)
It appears that individual cars are at just about the spatial resolution of the camera. Figure a car is something like 2 meters by 5 meters. Urthecast's camera, 'Theia', is advertised as a 5-meter camera (5m x 5m on the ground). So a car only takes up about half of a pixel. Which means that when the CCD is exposed, sometimes the pixel comes out white for a white car that happens to align itself totally within one cell of the CCD, and sometimes the car 'disappears' when it is overlapping two cells and is not increasing either cell's reflectance enough to make the cell come out white. (Note also that we only really see white cars; if you look very closely you may be able to see darker colored cars also, but they mostly blend into the road because they are not differently colored enough).
Theia is also a 'pushbroom' camera, which means that its CCD array is a linear array that is swept over the field of view (likely with a mirror or similar). Furthermore, the camera itself is moving through 30 degrees of arc while focusing on one area of the Earth, which means that as the CCD is imaging each linear set of pixels, it's moving within a camera that is moving on board a space station that is moving with respect to the Earth. So there is a *lot* of image processing going on to turn this collection of pixel rows into a coherent video. Some of that processing is likely to involve lossy processes and interpolation that provide a second source of this 'disappearing car' phenomenon.
Earth Cities (Score:2)
UrtheCast has released high resolution videos of three Earth cities taken from its camera on ISS.
Thanks for qualifying that. If you had only said "cities", my first question would have been which planet are they on.
OK, I was like, "meh", then... (Score:2)
OK, I was like, "meh". Traffic in Boston. Whatever. Then I noticed the hi-rises on the right... slowly moving (yes, I know the station is actually moving; but everything is relative).
Awesome, you can approximate the speed... (Score:2)
There's a whole lot of hype behind urthecast, but I have a feeling this thing is rather less useful than it's been made out to be...
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Okay, but look. The ISS roughly repeats its orbital path roughly every 3 days, taking a 5-meter resolution image. Landsat is 16 days and 15 meters. RapidEye is 5 meters at 5 days (or daily, if you are okay with some pretty oblique photos). MODIS is every 1-2 days, 250-meter resolution. There are many other options, but you get the idea. You choose your instrument based upon the needs of your project. If you're imaging the northwestern US in the summer, and you're interested in being able to check up
Your tax dollars at work (Score:3, Insightful)
So taxpayers have been pouring billions into the ISS so some company sticks a camera on it and sells you photos? Screw that. Should be public domain.
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That's a great way to encourage investment. This company has spent tens of millions developing this technology. Sure, that pales into nothing compared to billions, but it's still a lot of money, and denying them any return from it is ridiculous. Also, the ISS is not the USSS. If the ISSP gets some of the money from this company, then great, and they probably have already paid them a chunk of cash.
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Wow, that's going to be expensive... (Score:2)
Full motion video with that much resolution is going to be EXPENSIVE to store for very long so they are not going to be doing that.
The problem here really is the storage and retrieval of such huge amounts of data, at least that's the problem once you get the data down and processed. I think this kind of stuff is great for getting high resolution still imagery but they are not going to be doing video except on special occasions and for special locations. You are going to have to order it in advance, and the
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Dunno if it would end up being that expensive relative to the return. Kinda depends on what the video is worth though. But lets assume you keep 1 petabyte available in a google nearline system or equivalient you would be looking at around 10k a month for storage and say another 5k for access fees. Then a large scale tape library, say something along an SL8500 which stored over 2000 petabytes. It's not like you need realtime live access to the data. Client request then pull the data you need, process a
This brings us closer to google earth real time (Score:5, Funny)
Ok why? (Score:1)
Why is anyone impressed by this when the Hubble deep field exposure time was two million seconds, or approximately 23 days @ 16,000 mph.
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Any any hoo skybox is better: http://www.skyboximaging.com/ [skyboximaging.com]
Worst....Name....EVER! (Score:4, Insightful)
I thought it was a catheter company.
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Me too. I figured it was a site streaming video from a tiny fiber optic camera stuck up some guy's slindle.
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Me too. I figured it was a site streaming video from a tiny fiber optic camera stuck up some guy's slindle.
Okay, it wasn't just me then.
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The company is bankrolled by R Kelly, he wants to piss on you from space.
Geting hit by Piss, coming at us at terminal velocity. Sounds like the ultimate trickle down effect.
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Why? (Score:1)
Uuuh wow! - Uuuh no! (Score:1)
I was very excited reading the post, went there, and probably missed the sufficient nerdyness to actually appreciate what was shown in a low-resolution video clip of less than 1 minute. Okay, yes, it is moving, as high-rise buildings show. The rest is static, way way below Google Earth. What the heck! I said to myself and went to write this post.
Nice (Score:2)
"which is amazing considering the vibrations that ISS experiences merely from astronaut movements."
You might be surprised, but many cameras have a system to remove those vibrations and if not, there are filters for that.
Unfortunately also many filmmakers don't seem to know that or they're just to cheap to pay 50$ an hour to rent a steadycam fixture.