Yeah and I admittedly had a little skepticism about a few so I copy/pasted the coordinates in Google maps and there it was! We are a frightening and amazing animal we humans ;)
Pretty impressive. I was in military satellites back in the 70's and we were getting images like these back then. I also got to see some of the studies they did in infrared (to show vegetable vrs. concrete, vrs. dirt and buildings, ships, vehicles and people in different areas) and other wavelengths. I use to have some large images of Washington DC and Santa Barbara in infrared but lost them somewhere over the years. If people are impressed with the images taken today, you would have been blown away with with they were getting back in the 70's... although most of those we can't talk about. ;)
Pretty impressive. I was in military satellites back in the 70's and we were getting images like these back then. I also got to see some of the studies they did in infrared (to show vegetable vrs. concrete, vrs. dirt and buildings, ships, vehicles and people in different areas) and other wavelengths...
Mike
How to Make a True-Color Landsat 8 Image The article/tutorial explains how to download the "raw" image data, acquired in many wavelength bands, and adjust and combine them in various ways to highlight different features as Mike describes. It's interesting and fun, but the files are huge (at least by my standards). I think there's a separate tutorial linked in the article on how to use the site to search for the image sets you want to process.
Originally posted by Linked Article:
Since its launch in February 2013, Landsat 8 has collected about 400 scenes of the Earth’s surface per day. Each of these scenes covers an area of about 185 by 185 kilometers (115 by 115 miles)—34,200 square km (13,200 square miles)—for a total of 13,690,000 square km (5,290,000 square miles) per day. An area about 40% larger than the united states. Every day.
Although it’s possible to process all that data automatically, it’s best to process each scene individually to bring out the detail in a specific region. Believe it or not, this doesn’t require any tools more specialized than Photoshop (or any other image editing program that supports 16-bit TIFF images, along with curve and level adjustments).
The first step, of course, is to download some data. Either use this sample data (960 MB ZIP archive) of the Oregon Cascades, or dip into the Landsat archive with my tutorial for Earth Explorer. The data are comprised of 11 separate image files, along with a quality assurance file (BQA) and a text file with metadata (date and time, corner points—that sort of thing)
