Robin's Blog

Archive for the ‘Remote Sensing’ Category

Previously Unpublicised Code: RTWIDL

When looking through my profile on Github recently, I realised that I had over fifty repositories – and a number of these weren’t really used much by me anymore, but probably contained useful code that no-one really knows about! So, I’m going to write a series of posts giving brief descriptions of the code and […]

Blue Marble: From Apollo 17 to DSCOVR, an EPIC journey

NASA image ID AS17-148-22727 is famous. Although you may not recognise the number, you will almost certainly recognise the image: This was taken by NASA Apollo astronauts on the 7th December 1972, while the Apollo 17 mission was on its way to the moon. It has become one of the most famous photographs ever taken, and has […]

How I became Dr Robin Wilson: Part 2

At the end of the previous post in this series, I was six months into my PhD and worrying that I really needed to come up with an overarching topic/framework/story/something into which all of the various bits of research that I was doing would fit. This part is the story of how I managed to […]

Interactive cloud frequency web map, with Google Earth Engine

Summary: I’ve developed an interactive cloud frequency map, available here. It may be particularly useful for satellite imaging researchers working out where they can acquire imagery easily. One of the major issues with optical satellite imaging is that you can’t see through clouds: so normally when its cloudy, you can’t get anything useful from your images. […]

What’s new in Py6S

The last few months have seen a flurry of activity in Py6S – probably caused by procrastinating from working on my PhD thesis! Anyway, I thought it was about time that I summarised the various updates and new features which have been released, and gave a few more details on how to use them. These […]

How to: Fix weird ENVI startup file issues

This post is more a note to myself than anything else – but it might prove useful for someone sometime. In the dim and distant mists of time, I set up a startup file for ENVI which automatically loaded a specific image every time you opened ENVI. I have no idea why I did that […]

Software choices in remote sensing

I recently read the article Don’t be a technical masochist on John D. Cook’s blog, and it struck a chord with me about the way that I see people choosing software and programming tools in my field. John states "Sometimes tech choices are that easy: if something is too hard, stop doing it. A great […]

Py6S now has Continuous Integration & better tests

As a Fellow of the Software Sustainability Institute I’m always trying to make my software more sustainable – and one element of this is ensuring that my software works correctly. Although crashes might annoy users (which generally isn’t a good plan if you want your software to be well-used), a far worse problem is your […]