Where do the sattelite images come from?

[Kelburn]

Just wondering, but for all of you that do sattelite scenery (as in use sattelite images for ground textures in and around the airport) , where do you get your images from?

[ardypilot]

Where do the sattelite images come from?

Satellites?

I think you have to order them from local goverments in some cases, but you can also find them on the LINZ website for NZ, and Google Earth for free

[Timmo]

In my case I work in the geospatial industry so I work with this type of data all the time....If there are specific areas that you want (ie urban areas, cities) then go and see your district council and ask to see someone in the GIS section. If your request is for more rural areas/greater areas then usually your Regional Council is the best bet....

Most councils offer some kind of aerial photo service but not all provide them digitally and with the spatial reference information (i.e. the information that tells the computer where your photo should be placed in the computer world/Flightsim/GIS) The other problem is that all councils work in a different coordinate system to Flightsim (WGS-84 compared to NZMG/NZGD2000/NZTM) but if they have high end GIS software (i.e. ArcGIS 9.x) then they can reproject that imagery into WGS84 for flightsim

Failing that, Google Earth has a lot of Hi-res imagery but it can be difficult to make this work (although it least it is in the right coordinate system)....NASA also has good imagery too.

I put some photo imagery into Flightsim 10 the other night...its quite easy if you have a geotiff but using them does limit you also (i.e. can only do a simple water mask)

[Timmo]

opps...and to actually answer your question: Most of the imagery is likely to be Aerial photography as opposed to Satellite imagery. Using aerial photos enables imprefections and changes in scale due to hills etc to be removed (termed orthorectification) so that the photos can be used as a map (i.e. constant scale across the photos) and they align properly in GIS (or flight sim....Flight sim is a type of GIS effectively)

[Christian]

Hi Timmo

Hey, someone else from the geospatial industry Where do you work? I'm a at Melburne Uni in the Dept of Geomatics.

Ok, to contribute something to the thread, as Trolly and Timmo wrote LINZ and google earth are your best bet. The problem though is that photos are usually copyrighted and very very expensive - with the exception of the LINZ aerial photos (they are still copyrighted but are free). The google stuff is certainly copyrighted and you're not allowed to use it.

You can buy SPOT satellite imagery which is very expensive, or aerial photography from commercial operators, which is even more expensive. While local councils have great aerial photos they usually aren't available for public use. This is really the dilemma with spatial data. There are companies that pay big bucks for this data and us scenery developers are just peanuts...

Cheers,
Christian

[Timmo]

I work for Environment Bay of Plenty (the Bay of Plenty Regional Council)...we have a 5 person GIS team plus 2 cartographers and 1 Programmer (whos shares his time equally with us and the Database section).....Im just struggling to find time to work on scenery for flight sim.....itll get there eventually