Satellite Imagery School, Can you Spot the Missiles in your neighbourhood?

Think you are an expert at looking at google earth. Can you spot your house? The center of town? How about a missile silo? I came across this site while looking at urban issues as they related to military actions and war zones. The site has an exercise in reading satellite imagery, being that its a military centered site the exercise is to identify assorted military assets. Its an interesting exercise, though I have to admit I only kept to the instructed height of 14km for a very short period of time.

Spot the Military Assets

Type “Peenemunde, Germany” into the search box of Google Earth. Adjust your “Eye Altitude” to about 14 kilometers. Keep this ‘full’ picture in mind as I will refer to it in one of my questions.

Peenemuende is the tip of the island to the right of center. Center your picture on the SE tip of the main runway in view. Adjust Eye Alt to 7 kilometers.

Within the picture you now have in front of you, you should be able to locate:

• One A-4 (V-2) rocket
• One Fi-103 (V-1) cruise missile
• The original launch track for the Fi-103 as used in WW2
• Pruefstand VII (Test Stand VII), the launch point for A-4 rockets
• Two East German naval vessels
• A variety of East German aircraft

Find the rest of the assignment and exercise at; ArmsControlWonk: Wonk School: Overhead Images

Google Earth just got clearer

One of the First Images Taken by the GeoEye-1

Last week the resolution on Google Earth just got a little clearer. The GeoEye-1 came online and Kutztown University in Pennsylvania was the first picture that the satellite beamed back to its masters. Well the first image that was suitable for release to the public.

The 4,300-pound satellite collected the image at noon EDT on Oct. 7 while moving from the north pole to the south pole in a 423-mile-high orbit at 17,000 miles per hour, or 4.5 miles per second. The spacecraft can take photos at a resolution of up to 41 cm — close enough to zoom in on the home plate of a baseball diamond, according to Mark Brender, GeoEye’s vice president of communications and marketing. s

The GeoEye-1 Satellite is not actually Google’s, in so much as Google is one of its major customers. The Satellite was launched with another master, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. That’s right folks when you are flying around the world on google earth you are actually taking a look through a bonafide spy satellite. Of course the owners of the GeoEye-1 are downplaying that fact just a little bit.

“This is the opposite of a spy satellite,” Brender said in a phone interview. “Spies don’t put info on the Internet and sell imagery. We’re an Earth-imaging satellite, and we can sell our imagery to customers around the world who have a need to map and measure and monitor things on the ground.”s

Seriously Mark, stop saying it isn’t a spy satellite, it is way more cool for us celestial voyeurs to think/know we are looking through the same lens as the intelligence community. Of course our resolution isn’t quite as good. The government gets a resolution of 43cm while us googlers are only getting 50cm. Spy Satellite or not, I can’t wait till the GeoEye-a takes another swing past Montreal. I have been dying to know what all the sawing in the neighbours back yard is all about.

For those of you tech heads out there click here to check out the satellite’s specifications.

Maps when the world was especially vast.

An Eastern Metropolis

Maps are the way that most of us conceptualize the world. When someone asks you what the world looks like most of us picture the world map, and usually that map is the Mercator projection. North America up in the top left corner, Europe in the middle to right, Russia over in the top right, Africa lower middle and Australia down in the right. So much of our outlook has been shaped by these maps. Australians refer to themselves as being from ‘down under,’ everyone thinks that North America is just as big, if not bigger then Africa. This is mostly due to the proportions and layout of the Mercator projection. When people look at different projections of the world like an equal area projection it tends to make most people a little unsettled, the world tends too look wrong.

The Gulf of St Laurence During the Colonial Era

While I was a lecturer at Ulsan College I brought a copy of the “What’s up? South!” world map back from one of my trips home. After it had rolled off a conveyer belt in Newark, and slowly followed me back to Korea via a number of exotic airports I was finally able to put it up on one of my office walls. I had no sooner gotten it unrolled that one of my co-workers, the garrulous Professor Ahn came over to pay me a visit. When he saw the map I was trying to put up upside down, he asked me what I was doing. After explaining that the map was designed that we he instructed me to still put it with North at the top regardless of the way the writing was done on the page. South being up was just wrong and he quickly left the room, definitely a little unsettled. His reaction may seem strange when you write it down but if most of us are honest with ourselves we would have to admit that it isn’t that dissimilar from our own.

The same can hold true when looking back at historical maps, before satellites and google earth mapped every square inch of the planet for all to see maps of faraway and ‘new’ lands tended to inspire awe and a sense of mystery when you looked at them. Its possible to get a sense of what it may of felt like to look at this evidence of distant places that you may never have ever thought existed. The David Rumsey Collection is a vast online collection of historical maps, boasting thousands of historical maps that are digitized and accessible via the website. Looking at old area maps of the urban area’s that we live in can give a greater understanding of how these areas came to be. Not to mention its just kind of fun to look through them.

Mississauga is growing up

Mississauga City Center

On of Toronto’s largest suburban communities is growing up, quite literally. Amacon Developers decided to release both of the buildings in its Parkside Village project in order to meet the demand for units.

“People were standing out in the rain waiting for them,” she said of the 36-storey Residences at Parkside Village and the 45-storey Grand Residences that became available last week. “Amacon didn’t want them to come in just to see a sea of red dots, and think that everything had been sold.” source

Absolute Tower, aka The Marilyn

The Parkside Village project is part of the eleven block “urban village” that Mississauga is developing in its city center. One of the features of the development will be its 10 to 12 feed wide sidewalks, to allow for cafe seating and an active street life.

Amacon has been in the news in the past for the Absolute Tower or the “Marilyn Monroe” for its sexy shape.

The development of the “urban village” fits with Mississauga’s changing demographics. The city recently released an ‘Engagement and Directions Report’ which shows that the population of the city is aging. It is expected that the percentage of the population over 65 years of age will shift from 8% currently to 25% over the course of the next 30 years. The city currently is not seeing many young families or much of an increase in the less than 44 age group.

These urban living style developments are in high demand for all these aging baby boomers, most of whom made the exodus from urban areas for that two story detached with garage in the burbs. However out in the burbs there are very few amenities and services within walking distance and transit is thin in suburban areas. Condos provide an alternative in a densely packed urban core.

The Parkside Village development project is on 12 hectares of property in downtown Mississauga and turning it into a more pedestrian friendly city with smaller block sizes, (Jane Jacobs would be pleased) and using communities like Montreal’s old part as a starting point. Abandoning the excessively zoned style that Mississauga was built with and building stores and restaurants, a recreation centre, a wine cellar, a film screening room, patios, and a hectare of parkland centered on a green arcade down the middle of the development.

I for one am happy to see any move in the suburbs towards urbanisation, and with the Greenbelt that now encircles the Greater Toronto Area we are likely to see more projects like these as these ring cities are forced to start going up due to both limits on sprawl and the desire of the population for walk able urban developments.

Emporis.com’s listing of buildings for the City Center development.

The Life At Parkside Site.

Mississauga's Potential Skyline

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Satellite Surprises

Google Earth has been used by many to take virtual tours around the world and back.  You can see natural wonders, the house you grew up in, and fighter jets parked in residential areas.

PC World has a link to a great Google Earth tour that will show you a number of other oddities caught by roaming satellites.

Strangest Sights in Google Earth

žižkov television tower

Žižkov Television Tower

Deputy Dog has a post with some photos of a very interesting television tower in Prague. The žižkov television tower was built between 1985 and 1992 by the then communist regime. What makes it even more interesting is that it appears to have a number of faceless alien babies crawling up its sides. While these actually are an installation by Czech artist David Černý in the year 2000, they were later returned to the tower in 2001 as a permanent installation. Deputy Dog does a great job of letting the figures creep up on you in his pictures saving the best and, as he puts it, most disturbing photo for last. I would tend to agree, though I would also agree that I really like this art installation.

Continue Reading Deputy Dog’s post.

Some Wikipedia factoids about the tower.

The structure of the tower is unconventional; it consists of three concrete pillars that carry cabinets for the transmitters, a restaurant and cafe, and three observation rooms. From afar, the tower resembles a rocket launchpad. The tower is 216 metres (709 feet) high, with the observation decks at 100 metres (328 feet) and the tower restaurant and cafe situated at 63 metres (207 feet) in the lower ‘pods’. Elevators, equipped with speedometers, transport passengers to the different levels at a rate of 4m/s. The tower weighs 11800 tons and is also used as meteorological observatory. It is a member of the World Federation of Great Towers.

Continue reading the Wikipedia entry on the tower.

The Tower is Located at Point B

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Oh and if you didn’t click on the artists name yet, I suggest you do.  The entrance to his site is very fun.

Who Owns Central Park?

Image composed from the loop in Central Park. (Peter Funch)

New York Summer Guide has a great article on the battle for public space going on right now in Central Park. It seems that there is a turf war going on right now between cyclists, runners, dog owners, and, generally, any other mode of locomotion in the park.

It’s shortly before six on a recent morning in Central Park. Dogs frolic, off-leash, through meadows. Joggers breeze along the roadways. In the half-lit hours just past dawn, the park is the urban idyll that its founders, Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, envisioned at the park’s birth, 150 years ago.

But then you hear it, approaching in the distance, a stiff wind rustling leaves. The presence grows louder and crescendos until—whooooosh—they’re upon you: a teeming pack of cyclists bursting around the corner in a flash of neon spandex. Runners brandish their fists—or middle finger. Dogs and their owners scramble across the road, lest they be run down by the onrushing horde. It is every biker, runner, or canine for him, her, or itself. Before many New Yorkers have even had their first cup of coffee, the ongoing battle for Central Park is in full swing. “People think the park is a refuge, when you’re actually going into a cage match,” says Chris Yerkes, a Citi staffer who races on an amateur cycling team in the park. “You can liken it to an area which has no local government, no rules,” Manhattan Borough president Scott Stringer told me. The current situation is a New York City case study of the economic phenomenon known as the tragedy of the commons, whereby a shared resource is, inevitably, overexploited. Although interspersed with the tragedy are moments of high comedy.

Continue Reading ‘Who Owns Central Park?”

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The Complete Guide to Central Park

Central Park: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

It pays to look around the neighbourhood

Toronto Abattoirs, Tyler Anderson National Post

In Toronto, the King Street West Area, once mostly just factories and warehouses, the neighbourhood is fast becoming condo central for Toronto’s urbanite class. The area has a number of new projects, artist’s lofts, a new boutique hotel, and an abattoir. In the heated property market of years past, a number of condo owners have purchased their units and then been left with a bad scent in their nose. If the wind is blowing in from the west, the pervading odour isn’t the kind of thing that condo developers put in their brochures.

The city of Toronto has been receiving a number of complaints about said smell. However the abattoir has been there longer than anyone can remember (at least 100 years) and has an acquired right to the location since concepts like official plans were not even in existence when it was built.

“The only way you can get them out of there is by literally buying them out, and who has $100-million?” said Mr. Pantalone, quoting the figure city officials were told it would cost to buy the land and to compensate the company for lost revenues. Source.

It’s the kind of thing that is unfortunate if you bought on a day when the wind was blowing in from the east, but let it be a lesson to those shopping for condos to do a little more research than to check and see if the pool is inside or outside. Before you put your money down on a project, take a walk around the neighbourhood and see what is in the four or five blocks surrounding your potential building. At best you will discover convenient locations to do your day to day errands within walking distance; at worst you’ll discover a building where cows go to die.

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