Groom Lake July 2010 images

reply to post by BO XIAN


Eh, maybe they are trees. Who knows. I sure think the one on the left looks like a chopper.

That giant hanger maybe for these huge Black Triangles.

Thoughts?

That photo is really nice. What's the deal with the berm, is it natural or artificial?

reply to post by Marrr


The berm is absolutely man made. Funny thing is these berms and fences you see on the base don't really block the view completely from Tikaboo. It's almost like they are blocking the view of people on the ground or perhaps in Janets.

Stock piling dirt in a berm isn't all that unusual. If you don't stock pile it, you have to off haul it or spread it around the site. However, spreading it around the site would require grubbing the area to spread the dirt. That all said, I'm told by a civil engineer that the berm is unusual. [I don't recall exactly why since I'm not a civil engineer so the notion didn't stick with me.]

Maybe something like this

[atsimg]http://files.abovetopsecret.com/images/member/9947f165f0ef.jpg[/atsimg]

See this thread:
ID the aircraft Quiz
www.abovetopsecret.com...

[edit on 7/17/2010 by this_is_who_we_are]

Originally posted by gariac
Here is the mysterious triangular tower. You can see the round base, which is probably related to how they rotate the tower.

tower

Well it's obviously an antenna of some sort. I've seen pictures of it before, but never really looked at it. I don't know what discussion has already taken place about the antenna, but I've looked at this picture you've posted. It appears that each side consists of a 4x24 dipole array, which seems a bit much for most applications. Notably, it appears the arrays start at different heights on the two visible sides. It could be used for almost anything, probably communication or radar. It reminds me of a miniature over-the-horizon backscattering radar, but there are many reasons that wouldn't make sense or be possible with this antenna. Then again, this is Area 51, so you never know.

Originally posted by this_is_who_we_are
Laugh while you can. I draw much better on paper. Anyway, strange little tiny airplane?Ooutdoor grill? Trees? It's on wheels. Maybe.





[edit on 7/16/2010 by this_is_who_we_are]

Baby carraige????

reply to post by shmuu


Given the location of the tower, it is probably radar related, not comms. Combine the individual antennas to do beamforming. What is odd is this design is completely unique. Most of the stuff at Groom can be found at other air bases, but not that tower.

Height estimates are 150ft to 180ft. Clearly this is significant engineering since it uses no guy wires. It's more like high rise construction. The height is such that you can't see it from any of the nearby hills like Hawkeye.

I've just stitched together the Groom pano. It's killing the PC due to lack of RAM. [It's a quad core AMD with 8Gbytes.]

looks so boring outthere,you would think there would be something going on!

reply to post by gariac

[It's a quad core AMD with 8Gbytes.]

What operating system are you using?

Originally posted by gariac
reply to post by shmuu

 

Given the location of the tower, it is probably radar related, not comms. Combine the individual antennas to do beamforming. What is odd is this design is completely unique. Most of the stuff at Groom can be found at other air bases, but not that tower.

Height estimates are 150ft to 180ft. Clearly this is significant engineering since it uses no guy wires. It's more like high rise construction. The height is such that you can't see it from any of the nearby hills like Hawkeye.

I've just stitched together the Groom pano. It's killing the PC due to lack of RAM. [It's a quad core AMD with 8Gbytes.]

Do you use Hugin & autopano?

reply to post by gariac


Looked to me like it was put there to block any view of the hangar's door from Tikaboo?

reply to post by shmuu


Those auto panoramic programs don't work very well. However, they do a nice job at the borders if you want a smooth look at the "seems."

I have more memory on my linux box, so I'm pasting the images together with gimp under opensuse. Gimp runs better under linux anyway.

reply to post by Marrr


The berm isn't high enough to completely block the view from Tikaboo.

Here are the Groom Lake panoramas. File sizes 28Mbytes, 7.6Mbytes, and 2Mbytes. Same image, just different resolutions.

Groom Lake pano large

Groom Lake pano medium

Groom lake pano small

reply to post by gariac


The large one worked first time I clicked...but it went off....now it won't work....this is the best image of the base I've seen

Save the file to your hard drive rather than view directly in a browser.

Originally posted by gariac
reply to post by shmuu

 

Those auto panoramic programs don't work very well. However, they do a nice job at the borders if you want a smooth look at the "seems."

I have more memory on my linux box, so I'm pasting the images together with gimp under opensuse. Gimp runs better under linux anyway.

Well if you've never tried hugin with autopano, I strongly suggest you try it out once. It's free, open-source software and is far and beyond the best stitching software available anywhere. All other automatic stitching software (even the non-free ones) are pathetic jokes compared to hugin. Aside from doing a great stitching job automatically (including color-balancing the images between each other), and allowing you to manually adjust anything and everything if you want, it's also very memory-efficient and fast. If you're ever interested, you can send me a collection of photos and I'll do it for you so you can see the results without having to actually do anything =P

To give you an idea, here's a panorama from 28 photos taken over a two minute period auto-stitched by Photoshop CS4 and tone-mapped by Photomatix.

Harsh white balance variations and excessive alignment issues.

And here is the same 28 photos auto-stitched by hugin (with no manual adjustment).

White balance and alignment issues are virtually nonexistent.

P.S. Their website has compile instructions for several Linux distros.

reply to post by shmuu


Unfortunately I cleaned all the dust in the final image, so the individual frames are not suitable for stitching.

The results look OK, but you do realize my panorama is gigapixels not megapixels. When I cleaned up the image, I had to set the undo level in gimp to zero else it would take forever.

I have two more sets of images I shot that day. The first set might actually be better, but the light changed so much that I decided not to shoot the old burn pits area, so it is not as wide.

Stitching the panorama is actually the fastest part of the process. It takes a lot of time to determine which shots to use. Every frame is inspected to find the sharpest image. Then you need to decide where to chop it. Most places I set up the camera so there is empty space suitable for terminating one frame and going to the next. There are some places where that is not possible.

reply to post by gariac


Thank you for going through the effort to produce these high quality images, and posting them online for everyone to use.