This color infrared orthophoto was created from color infrared aerial photography film. Color infrared film is manufactured to be sensitive to red, green and near-infrared wavelengths. This type of film makes near-infrared reflected energy visible to the human viewer by capturing that energy and representing it as a visible color. The dyes that are used in the film render green objects as blue images, red objects as green images, and objects that primarily reflect infrared as red images. Because healthy vegetation reflects strongly in the near infrared, areas of vegetation appear red or pink. The appearance color for water in CIR imagery is highly variable and dependent on the depth and amounts of floating vegetation and suspended matter. It can range in color from olive drab through turquoise, deep blue and to black. Barren areas can be highly reflective at all wavelengths, thus frequently appear very bright in a CIR image.
This image has an overedge of approximately 300 meters on all sides, so the area encompassed is actually somewhat larger than 3.75 minutes by 3.75 minutes. Each pixel in these orthophotos represents an area of one square meter on the ground.
The image is in Multi-Resolution Seamless Image Database (MrSID) form. Like the other common photographic image compression methodology, JPEG, MrSID compression maintains high visual image quality even at high compression levels. The advantages MrSID offers over JPEG is a faster display rate and a 'smooth' appearing image at any magnification level, the latter being a manifestation of the 'Multi-Resolution' qualities of this imagery. The compression levels obtained make it possible to distribute this MrSID imagery over the web, even to users with modem-only access to the Internet, and to put a hundred or more MrSID orthos on a single CD-ROM. Imagery in MrSID form is supported in most major GIS software. It can also be manipulated in Adobe Photoshop or viewed, subset, and converted to standard TIFF format imagery with a free stand-alone viewer available from LizardTech (<URL:http://www.lizardtech.com>).
The user should be aware that adjacent orthophotos were produced from imagery with different center points. Because the orthophoto production process only corrects features at the ground level, the tops of buildings and other structures elevated above the surface of the ground 'lean' or 'tilt' away from the center point of the source photography and from their own bases. Adjacent orthophotos share common area because of the 'overedge' on each image. In these shared areas, the 'lean' direction of elevated objects will be different for the adjacent orthophotos because their source photography had different center points. For the purposes of photointerpretation of the locations of elevated objects visible in orthophotography, the user should select a point at the base of the elevated object rather than at its top. This convention will insure that the object location point appears at the base of the elevated feature, independent of which orthophoto is displayed as a backdrop. A point selected at the top of an elevated object in one orthophoto will very likely not fall at the top of the same elevated object in the adjacent orthophoto. Furthermore, the xy coordinates of a 'top point' so selected are neither the coordinates of the top of the object in the real world nor its base because of the 'lean' displacement in the orthophoto caused by the non-compensated height of the elevated object.
The primary datum tics (13 by 13 pixel solid white crosses) have the following ground coordinate values in UTM Zone 15 NAD83 coordinates:
corner easting northing NW 712315.74 3251522.28 NE 718383.51 3251637.59 SE 718516.89 3244709.98 SW 712445.41 3244594.81The secondary datum tics (13 by 13 pixel dashed white crosses) have the following ground coordinate values in UTM Zone 15 NAD27 coordinates:
corner easting northing NW 712319.95 3251344.82 NE 718387.84 3251460.14 SE 718521.22 3244532.78 SW 712449.62 3244417.61Because of the image detail that is lost when full-detail source DOQ imagery is compressed, the tics no longer appear as solid white crosses or dashed white crosses in the MrSID compressed imagery. Nonetheless, the primary datum tic can be differentiated from the secondary datum tic because the former appears brighter and whiter than the latter.
The ground coordinates of the upper left hand corner of the upper left hand pixel in primary datum (UTM zone 15 NAD83) coordinates are:
easting northing 712006.00 3251962.00The ground coordinates of the upper left hand corner of the upper left hand pixel in secondary datum (UTM zone 15 NAD27) coordinates are: