satellites stuff

The abundance and quality of freely available satellite imagery still confounds me. It's wild that we have free access to a global panopticon that is constantly updating, and is made possible by permanently orbiting flying machines that can be controlled by humans from earth. I can't imagine having explain this to someone from the past – I can just imagine Joannes Kepler getting palpitations upon hearing this news from a time-traveler.

More to the point though, is this series of collages composed of satellite images of cloverleaf intersections that are found and captured through automation.

This project began with an interst in cloverleaf interchanges, which I find visually compelling in plan view. I figured the best way to find several of them would be an automated script that finds all the geometric intersections of the highways of the U.S. Interstate system (which is roughly a grid, with odd ones going North-South and even ones running East-West). I then did a bunch of additional scripting to filter out the noise, false positives, and visually dull intersections. I was then left with around 500 sets of coordinates that denote locations of intersecting interstate highways. My web-based tool then allowed me to iterate over each coordinate, capture 4 map tiles each, stitch them together (I was too cheap to pay for the fancy hi-res stuff), and download a vector as well as raster of both the underlying geometry as well as the acutal satellite imagery.

Collaging these manually was the fun part, and what you see here are a few initial versions. I think this project is still in its infancy – I can't wait to do this with more rigor, print out some of these pieces at 4 or 5 foot height, and maybe even attempt a physical collage where I print each intersection separately and then manually collage it on a wall.