From the Firehose: Dove’s Eye View of the East Coast
As an Image Quality Analyst at Planet Labs, it’s my job (among other things) to comb through our data and monitor the caliber of our imagery. This morning, I opened up the Firehose, and found this gorgeous raw shot of NYC taken Tuesday April 5th at around 5 PM.
I then added the next scene in the strip and, with some color correction and rectification, turned this scene into this one:
For more on how we do our color correction at Planet, check out my colleague Rob Simmon’s blog post here.
Our satellites take a series of images, scene after scene, forming strips within each imaging window. Because of the orientation of our orbit, this means that in this same strip, we imaged the entire Northeast Corridor, from Washington DC:
The strip continued just south of Baltimore and up past Philadelphia:
Along 95 to NYC as we saw before:
And all the way up to Boston where Monday’s fresh snow still coats the ground:
All in a blistering 13 minutes (from 4:48 PM to 5:01 PM for reference). If only Amtrak could say the same. At such a late time, the sun hangs low in the sky, casting long shadows across the cities. Make sure you enlarge the images and look for structures like the Washington Monument and One World Trade Center to see the monstrous shadows they cast.
Back in October, 12 of our Doves were deployed from the International Space Station, including the one that took these images, Flock-2b 4. The ISS orbits the Earth in a 51.6˚ inclined orbit. If you were to take a marker from the station, and draw a line on the Earth below, the path it takes would look something like this:
So when Flock-2b 4 took those images, the strip looked like this:
This Dove orbits the Earth every 90 minutes, capturing two images per second during its trip. That’s a lot of data. We receive terabytes of images every day, and as a single analyst, it’s impossible for me to sort through the thousands of images the doves capture. The New York scene caught my eye, and as an East Coast native who has spent an inordinate amount of time in, or worse, driving between all of these cities, the images were particularly special to me. This strip highlights the place I was born, the homes of a large majority of my friends, and RFK Stadium where I loved to cheer on the DC soccer team last year (Vamos United!). The flood of images we receive daily makes the world seem dauntingly huge, but this strip made it feel just a little bit smaller.
