

Airplane is tripping on Google Maps - mcs
http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&msa=0&msid=100525912373773450724.000488df669787f20600d&ll=35.007009,-81.019181&spn=0.001619,0.003484&t=h&z=19
Weeeeeee
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exit
interesting - i guess the rgb (and luminosity?) channels are captured in
succession? was this captured by a satellite?

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Luc
I think that is what happened here.

Google Maps uses, among others, images from the Ikonos satellite. Here are the
specs: <http://www.satimagingcorp.com/satellite-sensors/ikonos.html>

It has a panchromatic sensor (greyscale) and red, green and blue sensors.
Ikonos has a ground speed of 6.8 km per second, so even if the sensors are
only a few centimeters apart, the images would need to be recombined at an
offset. The offset would be tuned for static ground objects.

So I guess the ghosting is due to both the altitude and the speed of the
airplane relative to the ground.

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tomerico
Because the direction of the offsets in the plane is at the plane's direction
it is much more likely caused by the plane's speed than its altitude or the
speed of Ikonos.

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Luc
Or this plane happens to be travelling in the direction of the satellite?

EDIT: here's another plane with the same (grey, red, green, blue) sequence:
[http://maps.google.com/maps?oe=utf-8&ie=UTF8&gl=us&#...</a><p>The sideways
offset seems to be roughly half as much as the offset in the direction of
movement of the plane, so at least that component would be due to the sensor
platform moving...

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michaelfairley
That plane is headed straight for PHX, and isn't too far away, meaning it's
probably traveling a lot slower than the other.

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spyrosk
Some similar cases:

<http://www.gearthhacks.com/dlcat24/Aircraft-in-flight.htm>

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DEinspanjer
"They've gone to plaid!" <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mk7VWcuVOf0>

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adamhowell
That's literally half a mile from where I grew up. If you zoom out a few times
you'll see Lake Wylie. My mom still lives right there on Lake Wylie Drive
right off of Mount Gallant.

What are the chances of that?

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joss82
Given the US are approximately 10 M square km, the radius you define is .5
mile. Let's say that 1% of the US is populated like the area where looking at.

PI * 0.5 * (0.5 (square miles)) = 2.03417191 square km. let say 2. That's the
size of the disc around the plane where your house could be.

10000000 * 0.01 * 2 = 200000 That's the total number of those discs fitting in
densely populated US.

So 1 chance out of 200000, that's in the same ballpark of the size of HN
community, so it was likely to happen to someone, but it had to be YOU ;)

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growt
see: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_problem>

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cynicalkane
Unrelated, because there are only O(N) possible location-hacker pairs, not
O(N^2).

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growt
I have the suspicion that you have no idea what you are talking about and
people are upvoting you for using landau-notation.

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cynicalkane
Actually, I used landau notation because it's the easiest way to explain why
you're wrong.

I didn't use exact numbers because I have no idea what numbers you have to use
to convince yourself that the number of hacker-location pairs would scale
quadratically with the number of hackers, as in the birthday paradox. It makes
absolutely no sense.

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iamdave
Holy cow, if you go into street view on Edna Dr. under the plane you can see
contrails, probably not the same plane but still kinda neat.

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fijal
That's just plane gay...

