Low Cost Panoramic Views From 112,000 feet

IgorC writes "Some engineering students at Texas A&M University have just received data gathered from a low cost 6 Mpixels digital camera (a Canon PowerShot S3 IS). Via NASA balloon, the camera flew up some 36 kms for 18 hours while storing more than 1600 images. The group writes: ' We are in our preliminary result discovery phase and patched up some of these frames together to produce several panoramic views from that altitude (the camera was looking down). They are viewable on the GeoCam blog. We intend on porting that information on Google Maps and Google Earth. For those of you who are undergrads and want to do something better, the folks at HASP-LSU will have a call for participants next year in their announcement page.'"

Blog link is 404, working link here

Panoramic views - Preliminary results [blogspot.com]

Great app for stitching together panoramas.

Auto stitch [cs.ubc.ca]

These folks had some problems (they mentioned that a picture was taken every 23 seconds and in that time clouds moved enough to make stitching a pain) but for general shots, wow, great app. Takes bloody forever (and you will notice a system slow down, even if you drop the process priority to idle), even on a 4400+ system, but it's certainly faster than doing it by hand in photoshop.

Installer is tiny too, it's not bloated like most software apps these days...

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How does Auto stitch's tech compare to commercial programs like Stitcher? [realviz.com]

Yeah, and?

Amateur... um, balloonists have been doing stuff like this for many a-year. Balloon v1.0 [vpizza.org] was featured on Slashdot back in 2002. Others have added put up geiger counters and even an R/C glider plane that returned to the laucnhing site.

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It's also common to use a kite [istockphoto.com].

Realtime images? Competition for Google Earth

Too bad this won't give Google Earth much competition. Someday in the not so distant future, satellite imagery may become real-time via low cost weather balloons. Now imagine having access to realtime satellite imagery, how much would that be worth? Using this technology, it wouldn't be so hard to get real time (or close to real time) images from the weather balloon.

Yahma
BLASTProxy [blastproxy.com] - A anonymous Apache based proxy service to safely bypass firewall restrictions

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That wouldn't work, would it? If you were looking at the surface of the Earth in real-time, you wouldn't be able to see half of it because of the clouds. That's why Google Earth is such a patchwork.

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The nsa has real-time satellite imagery with very high zoom levels today.
do'h I said to much.

Hey!

I can see my house from there!

low cost eh?

low cost 6 Mpixels digital camera (a Canon PowerShot S3 IS). Via NASA balloon, the camera flew up some 36 kms

Wow! A low cost solution! So... how much did that balloon cost, and how many man-hours went into that launch?

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Far less than into a satellite, I am sure of that!

They could have taken more pictures...

... if they hadn't set the camera to use the flash.

enterpise Enterprise

Space may not be Star Trek's "final frontier," but if humanity is going to start seriously gaining a foot hold there, it will be through private enterprise, not the Enterprise.

Faked

Did anyone notice how much these images of "Texas" resemble the images recently captured by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter [arizona.edu]? All they did was add some "clouds" and a few "roads" (obviously Photoshopped in at the last minute). This is just another example of the ongoing NASA conspiracy to convince Americans that there is intelligent life in Texas.

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Here in Australia, to the average joe, kms means kilometres and km/s means kilometres per second. Whether this is scientifically correct or not I do not know, nor do I really care to know.

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You must be new here.

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You mean the balloon was doing 36 km/s?

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No.

Re:kms = kilo*meter*second

http://lamar.colostate.edu/~hillger/brownridge.htm l [colostate.edu]

Guidelines for correct use (and common mistakes)

      1. Write symbols exactly as shown in the tables. Do not change the case, or add an "s" for the plural, or use abbreviations, or write a period after a symbol (unless it ends a sentence). Units named for a person have capitalized symbols. So does the liter (L), because a lowercase el (l) is easily confused with the numeral 1.* All other units have lowercase symbols, even when the surrounding text is capitalize

Correct Incorrect
kg [kilogram] Kg KG kgs. kg. KG.
km [kilometer] Km KM KM. km. Kms. kms.
mm [millimeter] MM mm. Mm

also, the the symbol for kilometres per hour is km/h , not kms/hr.

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Umm, no one in Europe would write "kms", since we know from school that the correct abbreviation is "km" even in plural. I would say that only someone from a country that does not use metric system would write "kms", since in metric country you see "km" writen everywhere, so you know better.

Re:Hmm...

Don't tell me you're trying to find the half naked girl near a farm house on the 3rd picture...

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I was looking at the two dogs humping in #1034.

Liar!

Hey! I looked for that girl for a half-hour before I realized you were LYING! The boss nearly fired me. I had to give him a bj to calm him down. Now I have a nasty taste in my mouth. You jerk.

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The link doesn't work, either. I know this site is free, but would the few seconds it would take someone to `peer review` submissions really hurt? What's the argument against it?

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Hey, we've been reading /. for 10 years with grossly misspelled article descriptions, broken links and dupes-a-plenty, don't go telling us what we should be having.

Next thing you'll start complaining about not being able to edit your posts.