12-15-2012, 09:28 PM
Quote:I also watched this and began to think that it might enlighten many if they looked at the late Raymond Selkirk's 255 line frontier with this satellite here in northern England, it may indeed change the whole thinking of why Hadrian's Wall and also some of the Roman history of Britain.Whilst the programme implied that there was one satellite specially tasked for this and that it was the latest declassified military tech, in reality this was inevitably done from commercial satellite imagery which is 'freely' available at various resolutions at around $1500/£1000 a pop. It is supplied to you in a raw, unprocessed format and you have to do all the processing - tying up the average pc for the best part of a day (I tried all this when I was looking at the satellite coverage of Saudi Arabia a couple of years back). Then you might have clouds or other junk littering the place on your expensive image. All of this explains why Google Maps/Earth images are so good: they take the raw image, process it, trim out the bits that aren't wanted, and then let you see them for free, often in multiple layers (some of the WW2 stuff is just stunning).
They played down the infrared aspect this time, unlike the Egypt programme, and bigged-up the lidar (which has been around for ages - 1960s to be exact - and the first UK archaeological application was on the Roman fort at Newton Kyme in the 1990s; see the free EH publication Light Fantastic for more info)
So, like much else in the programme, they played a bit fast and loose with the truth.
Mike Bishop
