From the Firehose: Boatspotting
Every day, we get thousands of images down from space. They appear in a browser we call the Firehose, a continuous stream of gorgeous new images. In a giant stream of reds, yellows, browns, tans of deserts and rock broken up intermittently by lush green forests, the vibrant, jewel-toned blues of our oceans and lakes pop out from the rest and are some of my favorite scenes. And of course, in water, we can see boats. We here at Planet call it “Boatspotting.” So as promised, here is the follow-up to my #planespotting post! I even have a nice transition to ease you in. Boats and planes!
In our imagery, we see boats serving many functions like these dredging boats below:
We see shrimp boats trawling mud and sand off the coasts of New Orleans and Saudia Arabia:
And container ships coming and going in the port city of Cape Town, South Africa:
We love to highlight port cities in our gallery. Here are a few images color corrected by the very talented, Robert Simmon.
Boats can be readily found along the world’s major shipping routes. Seen here is the bustling port of Singapore:
It’s more difficult for Team Planet to track boats than planes, so we can’t always tell what they are or where they are going, but here are a few of the most interesting boats we’ve seen in our data.
We here at Planet are armchair boatspotters, for a more advanced lesson in boatspotting, check out the work done by our friends at Timbr.io on automatic boat detection in our dataset!
