Category Archives: Planetary science

NASA Worldview satellite image browser adopts MyCarta perceptual rainbow

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I was thrilled this week to learn from Ryan Boller that his team at NASA’s ESDIS Project included MyCarta’s perceptual rainbow (the CubicYF) as one of the palettes for the Worldview satellite imagery browser.

If you’d like to try it, once on the viewer you can load an overlay and then you can choose from among several color palettes. The perceptual rainbow palette is listed here as “Rainbow 2”.

I am including below an example using the Land surface temperature for April 13 2013 from MODIS Aqua mission:

Land_surf_temp_130413

This is really exciting news as NASA’s adoption will increase the palette’s exposure and its chances of becoming more mainstream. This is also as close as I will ever get to realizing my childhood dream of becoming an astronaut. Thanks ESDIS, and thanks Ryan, on both accounts.

Do you know any cool apps?

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I’d like to pick up my Apps page, which I sort of abandoned a while back.

If you have any great app to recommend, I’d love to hear about it so please add them in the comment section to this post. I am looking for Apps for Android and iPhone/iPad in the following categories – ideally free or very low-cost, possibly open-source:

Geology

Geophysics

Cartography and mapping

Planetary Science

Image Processing

Visualization

Our Earth truly is art

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NASA has published a number of really good e-books on planetary science. Typically, each time I stumbled on one, I added a link on my Books page, but I could not skip writing about the latest one, which I discovered thanks to this post on FlowingData. It’s called Earth as Art, and it’s a fantastic book!

The pictures in this book are truly marvellous, and a thing of art. Here are my three favourites – I am so mesmerised by them I can’t stop looking (particularly the Ugab River one).

Enjoy. Check the book, and let me know which ones you like.

147VonKarman

Von Kármán Vortices, Southern Pacific Ocean

141UgabRiver

Ugab River, Namibia

117shoemaker

Shoemaker Crater, Australia

Digital cartography picks

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My top pick is NASA’s new integration of the Apollo Zone Digital data. It was done at Ames Research Centre thanks to a newly developed software system for orbital imagery. The software allows fully automated image mosaicking and terrain modeling of data taken from different positions, with different exposure and resolution, and even selects best image when multiple coverage exists. You can read about this exiting new development in the article Powerful Pixels: Mapping the “Apollo Zone” which has links to the open source software libraries Ames Stereo Pipeline, Neo-Geography Toolkit and NASA Vision Workbench. You can click here to download a kml file for viewing the image mosaic and digital elevation model in Google Earth. I tried it out and it looks great. Check these screen captures below:

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