Thursday, September 14, 2006

LUECKE

luecke

A conversation about wanting the window seat over the aisle in an airplane reminded me of this photograph I took when flying into Austin. About 40 miles southeast of Austin a large (I mean very large) plot of land has been cleared so that the remaining trees spell out "LUECKE" - the landowner's name. Allegedly the project resulted from a dispute between the county government and the landowner. There are no good explanations for "why?" and "how?" but somehow the owner could keep as much of the land that he put to use.

Besides being a landmark for pilots and a location hunt for google earth users, NASA uses the letters to calculate "spatial resolution for lower contrast vegetation boundaries" in images taken from space.

http://earth.jsc.nasa.gov/newsletter/SpatialRes/default5.htm#

Check out the bottom of the page for their technical uses of the 3,000 foot letters.

A commenter on Google Sightseeing calculated the font to be a 1,468,800 point size.

The moral of the story is that window seats are more entertaining.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Yeah, window seats are nice, unless you happen to be Bob Wilson (played by William Shatner). “Gremlins! Gremlins! I’m not imagining it, he’s out there! Don’t look, he’s not out there now. He jumps away whenever anyone might see him, except me.”

Anonymous said...

That's my last name....awesome!!!!