Spaced Out ::

As part of the availability of TopSat tasking to UK higher education, we had our initial request for three sites in Armenia approved and have just taken delivery of the first of these. Whilst the conditions were not ideal due to the presence of a large amount of snow at higher elevations, the 2.9m panchromatic and 5.7m RGB should be ideal for our use; namely acquiring ground control for classifying DMC data of Armenia. So other issues aside, when you zoom in on the data, as the screenshot shows, there are horrible block artefacts in the imagery. Whilst we have asked why this is, my guess is that this is lossy image compression, possibly applied at the satellite prior to download. At present it remains unfit for purpose (because I can’t actually see any trees even at 2.9m resolution!). Watch this space.