The BBC have released the first of a documentary series focusing on Remote Sensing, and how it has changed/can teach us about out changing planet. It’s definitely a tough subject to fill whole episodes with, so the style is somewhat blended between satellite imagery, and storytelling on the ground, which makes for a very different kind of wildlife documentary experience.
I’m particularly curious as to how they produced the ‘superzooms’, which involve both zooming into, and out from, individual elephants in Africa to a continent wide view, as they’re extremely well done. I’m a bit skeptical as to how much space cameras are involved in videoing shaolin monks, and am curious which satellites would even have the capability for this – maybe Vivid-i could capture a short video sequence, but the resolution wouldn’t really be high enough to discern individuals, and the recently defunct Worldview-4 would only be able to capture stills. Regardless, it’s really a well paced, emotional episode which I enjoyed immensely.
Sample from Worldview-4, available here
The series continues next week with an episode on patterns – the dunes of Namibia are an area whose beauty I only really discovered through sentinel_bot and I’m looking forward to learning more!
