Top Ten Weird Things I’ve Done While Working in Remote Sensing
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Top Ten Weird Things I’ve Done While Working in Remote Sensing
Anonym Thursday, April 17, 2014
- Found seals on icebergs. They look big and brown—commas and feature extraction works pretty well.

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Looked for deer in thermal infrared images, these were still images. The people wanted to find them because the deer were traffic hazards. I guess they were hoping the deer wouldn’t move. At that point in time, after collection, they had to drive the camera data to a lab to analyze it. By the time they returned, the deer weren’t there when they went to look for them.
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Met the Freedom Rodeo Queen of Lawton, Oklahoma, and her attendant while collecting field spectra for a calibration experiment. Was referred to as “the attendant” the rest of the trip.
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Observed catfish ponds for algal contamination that can result in “Off Flavor” catfish.
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Fixed that one troublesome pixel in my vacation photos with ENVI Pixel editor. It’s a darn good thing I didn’t know that existed in grad school. Anyone who has dealt with data that’s as correlated as a shot-gun blast knows what I’m talking about.
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Threatened a group of tusked pigs with an LAI2000 Plant Canopy Analyzer while on a ground truthing mission in Brazil to verify Landsat and EO-1’s ability to estimate fractional canopy cover. I was told very seriously to urinate on them should I get cornered. In case you didn't notice, my name is Amanda.
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Told people my spectrometer was a GPS so they’d stop asking questions about why I had a butter churn and was walking around an airport tarmac (pre- 9/11). I was attempting to calibrate Landsat 5.

The other “attendant” with butter churn spectrometer
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Spent time chasing AVIRIS—it’s not as romantic as it sounds.
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Was taken to many welding shops, pawn shops, gunshops, fireworks stands, and junk yards by an account manager who once said, “I can turn half an hour early into 5 minutes late if you’re not careful”. After these interesting visits, I’d then sitdown and talk very seriously about ENVI/IDL and solving people’s problems with software, not about the items found at the aforementioned places.
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Was told to degrade good imagery into bad imagery to see if bad imagery would work as well as good imagery.
GEOINT means exciting technology Nesting a hash within itself