Groom Lake photographs from 06/30/2008

Clearly I forgot to bow down to the god of good photography weather. I got drizzled on once at night and twice during the morning of 6/30. To shoot the base, I had to wait for a break in the clouds to get any illumination. What light I had was through a cloud and thus much reduced in intensity. These photographs were taken with a shutter speed of 1/20th, when normally I use 1/60th.

So much for the griping. This is a photograph of a Janet. It is not on the larger panorama since the frame was one of the blurry ones. [I generally shot each scene 6 times. Due to what proved to be a very brief time I had for shooting, I only shot each frame 4 times. The goal here obviously is to pick the best (sharpest generally) image.]

www.lazygranch.com/images/a51pan/june2008/janet.jpg

This images is a panorama of most of the base.
www.lazygranch.com/images/a51pan/june2008/a51pano06302008.jp2
You will need
www.irfanview.com/
to view a jp2 (jpeg2000) file. I can see two choppers on the jolly pad, with one being the old HH-60, and one I believe is a newer HH-65. There have not been any HH-65 spottings around the range, so who knows. The new hanger is compete, and unfortunately not illuminated very well.

Older Groom Lake panoramas can be found at
www.lazygranch.com/a51pan.htm

many thanks as always gariac,

i cant seem to get to or find this one:
www.lazygranch.com/images/a51pan/june2008/a51pano06302008.jp2



shame the weather caught you out,

thanks

snoopyuk

[edit on 10-7-2008 by snoopyuk]

Paul Wilson recently shot a spectacular panorama of the base. The lighting and visibility were about as good as you could hope for. The pictures can be found here:

www.dreamlandresort.com...

I had the same problem with the .jp2

For some reason it gives me an XML error. I have irfanview as my jp2 viewer, but silly IE won't load it.

I will try firefox and see.

Actually it looks like Firefox is downloading it to my desktop, so it's a stupid IE problem.

I also had to download the JPEG2000 plugins from irfanview.com for anybody who wants to take a look at the pic.

COOL!

What is the big tower for? And what are they keeping in the big hangar behind the mound of dirt?

It looks like the dirt is there to obscure the view. Maybe it's for 'Aurora' or whatever it is this week.

reply to post by snoopyuk


The link works just fine. You will need some time to download the file. It is around 20Mbytes. I provide an image that is nearly as good as the tif files. You may want to save the file first, then use irfanview.

6/30/2008 panorama

I embedded the link using ATCs tool, though like I said, the original post works just fine.

reply to post by Shadowhawk


I met Paul as he was coming down the trail. Those shots are from Sunday (6/29), so there is no base activity shown. Otherwise, they are fine. However, note that the visibility was not very good on Sunday. The smoke from California fires had already reached the range.

reply to post by emsed1


Thanks for reminding me about the plugins. The jp2 file is very close to the tif (uncompressed). I don't trash up the image with copyright notices, though as you know, a photograph is copyrighted as soon as it is taken as far as the courts are concerned. You can't believe the whack jobs I have to argue with to get them to remove my photographs.

The dirt looks like it will be there for a while. It has that 2:1 grading used for stability. [Think about how sand forms in an hour glass.] It costs money to remove dirt, so stockpiling is cheaper. Note that I have seen dirt haulers leaving Groom Lake via the NTS, so some dirt is off-hauled, perhaps for use on the NTS.

Nobody really knows what the large tower is for, well at least nobody on the outside. ;-) I have some night shots I haven't processed yet. I wonder if the tower is lighted at night?

Though this new hangar is huge, there has been a trend lately to build very large hangars and then populate the hangar with many small aircraft such as UAVs. You can see this at Creech. [I don't know if anyone has shot that base lately, but there is new construction going on there.]

Here is a pic of one of the new hangers at Creech. If you double click on the image and then click on the magnifying glass under the image you can see the Reaper in the hanger.
community.webshots.com...

reply to post by hank


From left to right, a Predator, some box, and a Reaper. Too bad the heat obscured the text on the box. Anyway, it shows the multiple planes in one big hangar approach.

Creech knows that people hang out by the fence and shoot photos. The base isn't all that remote. I suppose they could have oriented the hangar doors in another direction if they wanted privacy.

This new hangar at Groom is so tall though that you would think some assembly is going on there. That is, I don't see the hangar being tall to house a tall plane, but rather to work on a plane from above. I suppose a low probability guess for the need of a tall hangar would be to have a system where one plane rides piggyback on another.

Here is a photograph of the HH-60 and suspected HH-65 at Groom Lake.
HH-60 and HH-65

This photograph is an overlay of a night shot turned to red on top of the daylight panorama converted to grayscale.

www.lazygranch.com...

In short, it shows the large tower is lit at night.

Regarding the HH-60 and HH-65 photograph, the general consensus is a truck pulled in behind the HH-60 chopper on the right. The wheel is what looks liked the shrouded tail rotor.

Thank you for the pic. Why not just convert this to a hi-res jpg so that more than 2 people can view it?

reply to post by NightVision


As of the time of this posting, there have been 308 downloads of the file, not 2.

Why not follow instructions and view the jp2? It is superior to any jpg.

There is a bug in IE, so use firefox. Then view the image with Irfanview. Download ifranview and the plugins.

www.irfanview.com...
www.mozilla.com...

Note I provide this 20Mbyte file for free. Not one pop-over, pop-under, pop-sideways, nor embedded advert is shoved in your face. Nor is the panorama scribbled with a copyright. Nor do I beg for donations or peddle gear. So yeah, you might have to do slightly more work to get my panoramas, but they are worth it.

Originally posted by gariac
reply to post by NightVision

 

As of the time of this posting, there have been 308 downloads of the file, not 2.

Why not follow instructions and view the jp2? It is superior to any jpg.

There is a bug in IE, so use firefox. Then view the image with Irfanview. Download ifranview and the plugins.

www.irfanview.com...
www.mozilla.com...

Note I provide this 20Mbyte file for free. Not one pop-over, pop-under, pop-sideways, nor embedded advert is shoved in your face. Nor is the panorama scribbled with a copyright. Nor do I beg for donations or peddle gear. So yeah, you might have to do slightly more work to get my panoramas, but they are worth it.

....which is exactly why I don't own a PC, and neither do the other 306 users who downloaded your photo (like me) who can't open it. No bugs on a mac, people!

Irfanview doesn't even have a Mac option. So now I have to buy a PC, install mozilla, install irfanview, and download a plug-in just to download your photo. You're not making this very easy.

Tell you what. If have the ability to email me a hi-res jpg., I will happily host it for ALL ATS users so that everyone can easily view it.

reply to post by NightVision


Granted, the mac is not as capable as the PC, but I can tell you only 3% of those who surf my website use a Mac, so I suspect the majority could view the image just fine.

As they say, google is your friend. I found a java based jpeg2000 viewer:
jpeg200 viewer in java

The java ran fine on my PC. I didn't test it on the linux box, but will do that some time. The problem with the mac (oh and the mac is always a problem) is that unless things have changed, the java is tightly coupled to OSX, so if it works, fine, but if the JVM can't handle the code, you can't install an upgrade as easy as with a PC. [With a PC, Sun Microsystems will inform you to upgrade their java. It is painless. I do this for 4 JVMs (32 and 64 bit, windows and linux) without a hitch.]

Oh. make that 355 downloads as of this post, and I presume 354 happy campers.

Lastly, nobody hosts my images but me.

Originally posted by gariac

Lastly, nobody hosts my images but me.

I can tell you from personal experience 10+ years on a mac, I've never had one virus and less than 3 problems I couldnt fix myself. The lazygranch Image is by far the best panorama of A51, I've seen yet, and its resolution is high and still hosted on a website.

I've worked with photoshop professionally for 12 years, and I can most certainly tell you without having seen your photo that from the distance you took your photo, its not going to be any better that the last one just because its a jp2. So lets get off our high horse, mr. "nobody hosts my images but me". You think I want to steal your photo? I doubt its even worth stealing. I offered to host a low res version through imageshack.com because, despite all your technical wizardry, you apparently don't have the ability to even post a thumbnail version of this gem you have. Neither on this forum, nor on the web.


Tell 'em what he's won, Bob!


[edit on 16-7-2008 by NightVision]

oh c'mon people stop bickering, any way those pictures are amaizing, what kind of lens/scope did you use?

Originally posted by miguelbmx
oh c'mon people stop bickering, any way those pictures are amaizing, what kind of lens/scope did you use?

haha. Gariac can't give away that information. Nobody looks through Gariac's lens but Gariac.