02 December 2008

New features in Spot Image Gallery

The updated version of the SPOT Gallery proposing posters of wonderful pictures of Earth taken by SPOT satellites propose two new features :

A interactive photo album : http://gallery.spotimage.com/gallery.html

and an interactive map : http://gallery.spotimage.com/kml/gmap.htm

The later is obtained by requesting GoogleMaps to display a KML file that presents all the pictures as a GoogleEarth layer. The KML file is available here : http://gallery.spotimage.com/kml/gallery.kml It is very similar to the GoogleEarth version that you can still find here : http://gallery.spotimage.com/kml/googleearth_english.kml Nevertheless, there are some small real-estate differences between GoogleMaps and GoogleEarth that forced us to slightly rewrite the KML content. In particular, it is not possible to have big bubbles in GoogleMaps so we had to use smaller bubbles.

13 November 2008

Download SPOT archives in shapefile

Since several weeks the SPOT archive is available for download in shapefile from our online catalog : SIRIUS Online. Several files have been created to cover the various continents : Europe, Asia, Australia, Africa, Middle East, North America and South America. They can be find in the "My searches" menu or directly here : http://catalog.spotimage.fr/PageDownload.aspx


Here are the parameters that are exported in the shapefile :

A21 : A21 code
SC_NUM : Scene number
SEG_NUM : Segment number
SATEL : Satellite number (2, 4, 5)
ANG_INC : Incidence angle
ANG_ACQ : Acquisition angle
DATE_ACQ : Acquisition date (DD/MM/YYYY)
MONTH_ACQ : Month number (01,02,…)
TIME_ACQ : Time of acquisition (HH:MI:SS)
CLOUD_QUOT : Cloud quotation
CLOUD_PER : Percentage of clouds on the image
SNOW_QUOT : Snow quotation
LAT_CEN : Latitude of center
LON_CEN : Latitude of center
LAT_UP_L : Latitude of upper left corner
LON_UP_L : Longitude of upper left corner
LAT_UP_R : Latitude of upper right corner
LON_UP_R : Longitude of upper right corner
LAT_LO_L : Latitude of lower left corner
LON_LO_L : Longitude of lower left corner
LAT_LO_R : Latitude of lower right corner
LON_LO_R : Longitude of lower right corner
RESOL : Resolution of product (2.5, 5, 10, 20)
MODE : BW or COLOR
TYPE : Alphanumeric code for the type (P,X,M,I,A,B,J,THR,HMX,THX)
URL_QL : URL to access to the quicklook of the scene

The files are bundled by year since 2002 which is the launch of SPOT5. They are refreshed every month and the shape file for the current year is refreshed every week.

They can be used on any GIS software like ArcView, GlobalMapper (shareware), ArcExplorer (free) or MapWindow (free).

20 October 2008

Display a satellite image in your web pages

Using GoogleMaps Static API, you can easily display a satellite image in your web pages. For exemple, here is a SPOT5 view of the city of Auch in France :



Here is the corresponding HTML code :

<img width="320" height="320" src="http://maps.google.com/staticmap?center=43.643902,0.590429&zoom=14&size=320x320&maptype=satellite&key=API_KEY" />

01 June 2008

GoogleEarth dans une page web

La semaine dernière, Google a annoncé la sortie d'un plugin permettant d'afficher des vues 3D de type GoogleEarth dans une page web. Il ne s'agit pas de l'application GoogleEarth mais uniquement des fonctionnalités les plus populaires qui ont étés ré-écrites pour être intégrées dans un plug-in. Actuellement le plug-in ne fonctionne que sur Windows et est considéré comme beta par Google.
Par ailleurs, Google a aussi mis à la disposition des développeurs une API permettant de contrôler le plug-in par JavaScript. Cela va permettre de développer de superbes applications : la flexibilité de GoogleMaps avec le rendu 3D de GoogleEarth !
Les informations sont disponibles ici :

20 April 2008

SPOT images in Wikipedia

Spot Image has published several hundreds SPOT images in Wikipedia Commons.
These images are available under Creative Commons Share Alike 3.0 license. You can create derived products like this fantastic Animoto animation :

12 April 2008

SPOTGallery Gadget

Now that a new version of SPOTGallery is available, I would like to remind you of a Google Gadget that is available. It displays the wonderful images of the gallery right on your iGoogle home page or on your personal website.

The gadget can be find on Google's Gadget Library : http://www.google.com/ig/directory?synd=open&q=SPOTGallery and http://www.google.com/ig/directory?synd=open&num=24&url=http://gallery.spotimage.com/gadgets/earth.xml&output=html