How to search on the Internet for Steve Fossett's Citabria taildragger

I agree with John. I think the small dark images on the hit site are
just for reference. I believe the concept is for you to download the
kml file and plug in the hit coordinates into GE. Then browse that
area. I also found that if you do a print screen of the area, load it
into a photo processor and brighten the image, it helps. Also, the
ruler can be put to good use in GE. If you find anything interesting,
you can measure it to see if it's in the ballpark for a plan wreckage.

Here's an example:

http://images5.fotopic.net/?iid=yorp...ze=1&nostamp=1

All I did was lighten the screen shot a little and annotate the picture.
The splotch is about 22 feet long using the GE ruler. I'm sure it's
nothing - probably just a rock ;-) But it serves as an example of how
one can use GE, the ruler and the coordinate system to locate possibilities.

I also found that once the kml file was loaded into GE, it became very
sluggish - much more so than normally using GE. Maybe my machine is
lacking - Win-XP SP2, 1 gig of RAM, 3 GHz processor. I'm sure more RAM
would help.

Arthur Hass
Reston, VA

John Tyson wrote:
wrote in message ...
In sci.geo.satellite-nav John Tyson wrote:
Clarence, did you notice any discrepancy in the dimensions you saw in
Google Earth vs. those they are showing in the "hit" images? Seemed to
me they differed by almost a factor of two on the few I looked at.
The image shown on the web site is too small and dark for me to think
much about it. I noticed that they indicate the image is roughly 278 feet
square, but that has nothing to do with the initial zoom when you "fly to"
the coordinate in Google Earth. My initial zoom shows a ruler of 948
feet,
and an eye altitude of 3281 ft. They suggest an eye altitude of 1500 feet
for Google Earth. The hit that I just accepted is near some houses, so I
have some judgment of whether I would be able to spot a car or small
aircraft. If they expect people to just review the image on the web page,
that seems fairly worthless to me, but maybe it will work.

If he were around 37.422,-122.084 he would be easier to spot. There, I
can
zoom to a ruler size of 40 feet and still see crisp imagery.

--
Clarence A Dold - Hidden Valley Lake, CA, USA GPS: 38.8,-122.5

The small images are definitely not usable. I can make out some detail on
the screen, but as you say they are almost black. Mainly though, the pixel
resolution in the images is much coarser than if you go to the Google Earth
location. I think they should probably have emphasized that in the
instructions, since some people may be trying to search the small images.
One thing I found useful, in both the presented images and the Google Earth
view, is to load the image into photoshop and enhance the contrast; on my
screen the Google Earth image is also very dark and lacks contrast. I
haven't looked, but there might be a Google Earth setting to adjust
contrast.

Per my original comment, the 278 feet seems to be closer to 350 or 400 feet
in the Google Earth imagery, so my "factor of two" was a little high.

John

"Larry Dighera" wrote in message
...
On Wed, 12 Sep 2007 07:07:10 GMT, miket6065
wrote in :

. In addition, you can get a search area assigned to you on Amazon's
Mechanical Turk by going here
http://www.mturk.com/mturk/preview?g...21T60&kw=Flash

7. Then press the "Accept Hit" button and log in.


Even though you may already have an Amazon account, you will have to
agree to:

Snip, like, 40K bytes of text

So, like, do you get paid by the word or something?

--
Geoff
The Sea Hawk at Wow Way d0t Com
remove spaces and make the obvious substitutions to reply by mail
When immigration is outlawed, only outlaws will immigrate.

In sci.geo.satellite-nav Ed edATridersiteDOTorg wrote:

http://images5.fotopic.net/?iid=yorp...ze=1&nostamp=1

All I did was lighten the screen shot a little and annotate the picture.
The splotch is about 22 feet long using the GE ruler. I'm sure it's

I see that as about 15 feet long. I wouldn't have considered it a
significant hit, but looking away, and then scanning that area again after
a while, it does catch my eye. I have an eye altitude of 350 feet, and a
scale legend at 99 feet to match your screen shot. If I turn on ground
altitude by clicking Terrain in layers I see numbers that I think are
similar to yours, but I think the elevation above ground is more
interesting for this case.

--
Clarence A Dold - Hidden Valley Lake, CA, USA GPS: 38.8,-122.5

Yes. I'm at a bit of a loss as to how GE does the distance
calculations. I don't really doubt them, but many issues come into play
- ground altitude, eye altitude and any tilting imparted.

I forgot to mention that you can also measure the distance from the
Flying M Ranch. In this case it was 3.88 miles.

BTW, if anyone disagrees with the location of the airstrip see:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying-M_Ranch

and do a little editing ;-)

wrote:
In sci.geo.satellite-nav Ed edATridersiteDOTorg wrote:

http://images5.fotopic.net/?iid=yorp...ze=1&nostamp=1

All I did was lighten the screen shot a little and annotate the picture.
The splotch is about 22 feet long using the GE ruler. I'm sure it's

I see that as about 15 feet long. I wouldn't have considered it a
significant hit, but looking away, and then scanning that area again after
a while, it does catch my eye. I have an eye altitude of 350 feet, and a
scale legend at 99 feet to match your screen shot. If I turn on ground
altitude by clicking Terrain in layers I see numbers that I think are
similar to yours, but I think the elevation above ground is more
interesting for this case.

On Wed, 12 Sep 2007 16:40:58 +0000, dold wrote:

http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&ll=3...11,-119.000258

Even simpler, I found this shortest URL on another group.
http://maps.google.com/?q=38.618111,-119.000258

I agree, it would be wonderful to have the coordinates of the 8 previously
uunknown crash sites.

Does anyone have coordinates for crash sites that haven't been cleaned up?

It would be a great reference for out search effort!

"Dominic Sexton" wrote in message
...
In article , John Tyson
writes
The small images are definitely not usable.

They definitely are here. Only on a few of them have I felt the need to
use Google Earth to zoom in on part of the image that shows something
unusual.

I can make out some detail on
the screen, but as you say they are almost black. Mainly though, the
pixel
resolution in the images is much coarser than if you go to the Google
Earth
location. I think they should probably have emphasized that in the
instructions, since some people may be trying to search the small images.

I'm sure many are and in my experience that is perfectly acceptable.

One thing I found useful, in both the presented images and the Google
Earth
view, is to load the image into photoshop and enhance the contrast; on my
screen the Google Earth image is also very dark and lacks contrast.

Sounds like you might benefit from adjusting your monitor:

http://www.users.on.net/~julian.robi...st-monitor.htm

If it is an LCD flat panel you may want to experiment with the angle you
view it from too as that can have a marked influence on the brightness and
contrast.

--

Dominic Sexton

I retract my original statement about the pixel resolution being too coarse;
in reality it's about as good as what you get in Google Earth. The Google
Earth imagery "looks" better, but this is subjective I think; the detail you
can resolve is about the same in the small image and in Google Earth. (By
my calculations the pixel interval in the small images is about 1.5 feet.
The title of the kml file implies 1 meter resolution, but it's not clear if
this is the pixel interval in the original imagery or some other measure of
the image resolution. In any case, the 1.5 feet of the small images seems
adequate for the job.)

Regarding the monitor adjustments: You are probably right; I'm using an LCD
monitor, and the normal settings don't pull out details in the lowest
levels, even at optimum viewing angles. As far as I know I don't have any
way of adjusting the brightness/contrast/gamma on the monitor, so going to
Photoshop or some other image processing seems to be my only alternative to
pulling out detail in the imagery.

I was thinking about this today while away from my computer, and it occurred
to me that the darkness of the basic imagery may have been intentional; if
they expect the airplane to be significantly brighter than the background,
they may have darkened the normal imagery so a brighter object would stand
out. If anyone knows the coordinates of some of the wrecks they have found
I think it would be interesting to look at these in order to get a better
idea of what to look for.

John

"John Tyson" wrote in message
...

If anyone knows the coordinates of some of the wrecks they have found
I think it would be interesting to look at these in order to get a better
idea of what to look for.

John

Sorry Clarence; I did read your earlier message, but overlooked your asking
the same question

John

On Wed, 12 Sep 2007 17:11:57 -0400, Ed edATridersiteDOTorg wrote:

I agree with John. I think the small dark images on the hit site are
just for reference. I believe the concept is for you to download the
kml file and plug in the hit coordinates into GE. Then browse that
area. I also found that if you do a print screen of the area, load it
into a photo processor and brighten the image, it helps. Also, the
ruler can be put to good use in GE. If you find anything interesting,
you can measure it to see if it's in the ballpark for a plan wreckage.

Here's an example:

http://images5.fotopic.net/?iid=yorp...ze=1&nostamp=1

All I did was lighten the screen shot a little and annotate the picture.
The splotch is about 22 feet long using the GE ruler. I'm sure it's
nothing - probably just a rock ;-) But it serves as an example of how
one can use GE, the ruler and the coordinate system to locate possibilities.

I also found that once the kml file was loaded into GE, it became very
sluggish - much more so than normally using GE. Maybe my machine is
lacking - Win-XP SP2, 1 gig of RAM, 3 GHz processor. I'm sure more RAM
would help.

I noticed that too, it is so slooooooow it's painful to move your
view.

Arthur Hass
Reston, VA

John Tyson wrote:
wrote in message ...
In sci.geo.satellite-nav John Tyson wrote:
Clarence, did you notice any discrepancy in the dimensions you saw in
Google Earth vs. those they are showing in the "hit" images? Seemed to
me they differed by almost a factor of two on the few I looked at.
The image shown on the web site is too small and dark for me to think
much about it. I noticed that they indicate the image is roughly 278 feet
square, but that has nothing to do with the initial zoom when you "fly to"
the coordinate in Google Earth. My initial zoom shows a ruler of 948
feet,
and an eye altitude of 3281 ft. They suggest an eye altitude of 1500 feet
for Google Earth. The hit that I just accepted is near some houses, so I
have some judgment of whether I would be able to spot a car or small
aircraft. If they expect people to just review the image on the web page,
that seems fairly worthless to me, but maybe it will work.

If he were around 37.422,-122.084 he would be easier to spot. There, I
can
zoom to a ruler size of 40 feet and still see crisp imagery.

--
Clarence A Dold - Hidden Valley Lake, CA, USA GPS: 38.8,-122.5

The small images are definitely not usable. I can make out some detail on
the screen, but as you say they are almost black. Mainly though, the pixel
resolution in the images is much coarser than if you go to the Google Earth
location. I think they should probably have emphasized that in the
instructions, since some people may be trying to search the small images.
One thing I found useful, in both the presented images and the Google Earth
view, is to load the image into photoshop and enhance the contrast; on my
screen the Google Earth image is also very dark and lacks contrast. I
haven't looked, but there might be a Google Earth setting to adjust
contrast.

Per my original comment, the 278 feet seems to be closer to 350 or 400 feet
in the Google Earth imagery, so my "factor of two" was a little high.

John

On Wed, 12 Sep 2007 19:11:00 -0400, "Capt. Geoffrey Thorpe" The Sea
Hawk at wow way d0t com wrote in
:

"Larry Dighera" wrote in message
.. .
On Wed, 12 Sep 2007 07:07:10 GMT, miket6065
wrote in :

. In addition, you can get a search area assigned to you on Amazon's
Mechanical Turk by going here
http://www.mturk.com/mturk/preview?g...21T60&kw=Flash

7. Then press the "Accept Hit" button and log in.


Even though you may already have an Amazon account, you will have to
agree to:

Snip, like, 40K bytes of text

So, like, do you get paid by the word or something?

Do you think it's reasonable for Amazon to _require_ participants (who
already have an Amazon account or not) in the search for Fossett to
agree to payment terms before Amazon will permit them volunteer to
help?

On Thu, 13 Sep 2007 15:28:49 GMT, Larry Dighera wrote in :

Do you think it's reasonable for Amazon to _require_ participants (who
already have an Amazon account or not) in the search for Fossett to
agree to payment terms before Amazon will permit them volunteer to
help?

Short answer: yes.

Explanation: The Mechanical Turk is something Amazon runs as a
business.

It happens to be useful for distributing a few hundred thousand
images to volunteers to look at.

I read over the agreement and learned about the Mechanical Turk
before signing the agreement.

It's just boilerplate associated with the already-existing
MT business that friends of Fossett are using to do the
search. It's no more life-threatening than hundreds, if not
thousands, of boilerplate agreements that I've signed in the
24 years I've been using computers.

I've done 720 images so far, working a few minutes here and
there. I don't have any great hope that this will find Fossett,
but I don't mind pitching in from time to time anyway.
My guess is that the resolution of the images is going to be
too poor to see a plane nose-down in a forest, crumpled up
against a canyon wall, or crashed-and-burned.

Marty
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