Talking Pyramids » satellite

Astronaut Sends Pyramid Photo via Twitter

Vincent — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 22:00:43 +0000

Astronaut Soichi Noguchi is currently flying through space aboard the International Space Station and he is using Twitter to communicate with us Earthlings. He goes by the name: @Astro_Soichi

He has just posted a photo of the pyramids at Dahshur. The Red pyramid and the Bent pyramid can easily be seen from space:

YES, you can see pyramid from space :-) Late afternoon in Egypt.

YES, you can see pyramid from space Late afternoon in Egypt.

Read Soichi Noguchi’s tweets at his his Twitter page.
View Soichi Noguchi’s Twitter photos
View a satellite photo of Dahshur on the Dahshur page.

Ancient Egypt News for Sunday 20-12-09

Vincent — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 23:00:00 +0000

The BYU Egypt Excavation Project, returns to Egypt in January to map Sneferu’s fourth pyramid using GPS.

Professor of ancient scripture at BYU and soon to be program director, Kerry Muhlestein, believes they have uncovered evidence of a unified plan and suggests we need adjust our understanding of what the intended purpose of pyramids was:

After a years-long excavation, done by BYU-paid Egyptian laborers to aid their economy, the group can now focus on the connections between Seila and Snefru’s three other nearby pyramids.

“It’s starting to become clear that, contrary to what most Egyptologists and history books have taught… these (pyramids) were built to work in conjunction with each other,” said Kerry Muhlestein, a professor of ancient scripture at BYU, who will become the program director upon Griggs’ retirement. “It makes us rethink what the purpose of the pyramid was.”

Pyramids have been considered elaborate burial spots for kings, Muhlestein said. However, why would Snefru build four when he would only be buried in one?

Muhlestein has several ideas about how Snefru’s pyramids are interconnected in design and purpose, but didn’t want to delve into details before the official report is finished.

“By the time we’re done with our publication, people will have to reevaluate and come to a different understanding of the purpose of pyramids in Egyptian culture and religion,” he said.

PHOTO: Boat pit of Unas is 44m long and is located next to the processional ramp: http://bit.ly/70L5sx #
PHOTO: Inside the Pyramid of Unas – the patterned alabaster wall surrounding the sarcophagus: http://bit.ly/60VWFk #
From the vault: Restoring a Mud-Brick Tribute to a Departed Egyptian King – the cult center of Khasekhemwy at Abydos: http://bit.ly/7GLfwF #
Over 100 models of daily life found in the tomb in hundreds of pieces…held together with pegs: http://tr.im/I66Y (via @eloquentpeasant) #
PHOTO: Sarcophagus of Nekhet-iset-aru before its installation at the National Museum in Singapore December 18, 2009: http://bit.ly/4Qv9Fo #
Ex-C.W. Post museum chief pleads guilty to theft of nine ancient Egyptian artifacts and pocketing $32,000: http://bit.ly/8jdq6U #
BYU's 'campus' and the fourth pyramid of Sneferu at Seila: http://bit.ly/5J7zZT #
Pyramid geezer tries a hand at tomb raiding in The Mysteries of Egypt: http://bit.ly/8ePnBd #
Press Release from Zahi Hawass – Pylon Tower Raised from Alexandria Harbor: http://bit.ly/7xs9hE #
The final programme of CRE XI (Leiden, 5-8 January 2010): http://bit.ly/8E86he #

The slide show is of the inside of the Unas Pyramid. More photos can be found on Flickr and more information on the Pyramid of Unas can be found on Pyramid Texts Online.

Google Upgrades Giza Resolution

Vincent — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 03:01:37 +0000

Google has upgraded the Giza area in Google Earth and Google Maps with higher resolution imagery allowing us to see the pyramids in more detail.

You can now pick out people on the plateau, the trial passages referred to by Petrie, and even individual toes of the Sphinx’s front paws.

I look forward to more of Egypt to be updated with higher resolution images so that the other pyramid fields can be viewed in more detail. Incidentally, Google has recently introduced a new method of notifying it’s users of areas that have been updated on a monthly basis. At least this was the case for the July update which was released as a KML file You’ll need to have Google Earth installed to be able to view the KML file.

Exploring Middle Egypt in Google Earth

Vincent — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 23:26:03 +0000

Stefan Geens' tour of Upper Egypt

In relation to yesterday’s post, in which I talked about the use of 360Cities panoramas on the Giza pyramid field, I have just come accross a post on Ogle Earth by one of the photographers who created some of these spherical panoramas, Stefan Geens. I usually keep an eye out for any news on the archaeological use of Google Earth and ‘Digital Archaeology’ in general but some how I missed this one and only found it this morning while reading Andie Byrnes’ blog: Egyptology News, a must for any one interested in keeping up to date with all things Egyptological.

Stefan reports on his trip through middle Egypt with a group of Egyptology students from the Leiden and Leuven Universities. In his post he describes all the tools and applications that he used to document their travels and make them available on the web.

An excerpt from his post:

For the duration of our trip, I had a GPS unit in my rucksack, gathering data. I used a Garmin Oregon 300, which proved to be very robust and doggedly determined to stay locked onto its satellites — often even well into a rock tomb, with just a small opening to the sky. It would eat a pair of AA batteries per day, and every evening I also made sure to save the day’s readings into a track. Because I had a laptop with me, I also backed up the data to my Mac daily using the free LoadMyTracks, saving both GPX and KML versions of the data. The Garmin can keep multiple days of readings in its memory before filling up, but I wanted a redundant set of data.

At the start of the trip I made sure to calibrate the time on my GPS with the time on my camera, and then took pictures and 360-degree panoramas at will. (I’ve already written up how I make my panoramas.)

Once home, I georeferenced my photos using the free GPSPhotoLinker for the Mac. I gave it all the GPX files I had from the trip — GPSPhotoLinker seamlessly collated them, and then batch-processed the photos to a time-weighted average of the closest track points. After editing them in Aperture for Mac, I uploaded a subset to Flickr using the FlickrExport plugin. Flickr can read the EXIF coordinate metadata, so all the photos in the trip’s Flickr set are georeferenced. I also wrote detailed captions for each uploaded photo.

I then used Adam Franco’s still unique (to my knowledge) Flickr Photo Set to KML web app to create a KML file that references the Flickr photos in the set, and also shows their captions. The app works well but hasn’t been updated in a while, so the resulting KML needed some tweaking, for example to make sure it references the newer default Google Earth icons.

Turning to the 360-degree panoramas: Once I was happy with them, I exported a 100% quality full-size JPEG of each panorama — weighing in at 32MB and around 12,000×6,000 pixels per file — and uploaded these to my account at 360Cities. For each photo, 360Cities lets you select its location on a map, either by dropping a pin on a Google Map or by entering the exact coordinate data. As you can zoom in a lot closer on the imagery in Google Earth than on Google Maps, I made accurate new placemarks for them in Google Earth and then copied their coordinates into 360Cities.

You can read his post and download the Google Earth KMZ files here:
Middle Egypt trip report – the Google Earth version
Further Notes

You can also read Stefan’s more recent post: Geotagging tools for Lightroom, Aperture: An update

Finding the Inner Indiana Jones in Sudan

Vincent — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 09:12:21 +0000

Jebel Barkal in Google Earth

Still on the topic of ‘Satellite Archaeology’ surveyor Rob Rosa, writes about using satelilites and sophisticated tools such as the Carlson SurvCE while surveying an archaeological site located at the base of Jebel Barkal, a sandstone table-mountain close to the Nile River and about 390km south of the Egyptian border.

As we came upon the small mud brick structures that made up the town, there it was. Jebel Barkal is a very imposing figure. Tim had described the mountain as “small” before, and in the distance it was. The closer we got, however, the more I got to see of the mountain I had viewed on Google Earth so many times before. After arriving at the compound where we would be staying for the next four weeks, we decided to venture out to the site. It was amazing. After some 4,000 years, many of the walls of some of the oldest religious temples were reduced to nothing more than two meters high. Many columns were still standing, some elaborately carved. Many relief blocks, carved with figures and icons I had only seen in books, movies, and at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, were sitting right in front of me. I was standing in the middle of history. My first day on the job, I began by setting up the GPS base station. There were no survey stakes or hubs available, and rebar was nowhere to be found. Once everything was operating correctly, I walked down to a shop near our compound in search of a soda. Along the way, I found a valve from a truck motor. It was about 15 centimeters long, with a head about 4 centimeters in diameter–a perfect monument. I set it as the GPS base point, took ties to the nearest building corners, and set up the tripod, which did not move the entire four weeks….

View Larger Map View in Google Earth

You can explore the area in Google Maps by interacting with the embedded map above.

The Jebel in 3D
Another task that I gladly took on was to compile the previous year’s data, incorporate the new topographical surveys, and then create a 3D model of the mountain. Using Carlson Survey, I was able to piece together earlier 3D polyline data and the spot shot data per day to create a 3D model including the landscape. Pawel was then able to take a DXF of my model, and incorporate five separate artistic 3D renderings of the temples he had done in previous years. By matching the temples to the baseline coordinates, he created a picture of what the site may have looked like thousands of years ago. While not complete–the top 15 to 20 meters of the mountain will need to be surveyed to complete the picture–the current terrain model is very true to life.

Read the origial article online or download the PDF: Finding my Inner Indiana Jones – Using Carlson SurvCE to Survey History

View the area in Google Earth: Jebel Barkal

A Digital Eye of Horus for Archaeologists

Vincent — Sat, 27 Dec 2008 03:00:09 +0000

As technology evolves at an increasingly rapid rate, the study of ancient sites is aided by some of it’s developments. One such tool that has leaped into the hands of Egyptlogists and Archaeologists in recent years is the satellite. A great boon to any study of a site is the ability to view an area from above.

In the previous story we heard Dr Zahi Hawass state that he begins any archaeological work on the Giza plateau by climbing to the top of the Great Pyramid to get an overview of the site. The bird’s eye view that is provided by aerial photography and satellite imaging has been instrumental in the discovery of new sites, sites that woud perhaps never have been discovered.

Abbas Zaghloul is an official with both the Egyptian Supreme Council of Antiquities and Egypt’s National Authority for Remote Sensing and Space Sciences. He has indicated that Egypt will be using satellites and remote sensing technology to assist Egypt in the discovery and recovery of antiquities. Feasibility studies have already been carried out and the SCA will be hosting a two day seminar in February to discuss the subject and review remote sensing technology applications.

Sarah Parcak
As the images obtained from satellites continue to get sharper and more detailed their effectiveness in locating undiscovered ruins increases. Archaeologist Sarah Parcak has become a pioneer in the field of ‘Satellite Archaeology’ and has already located hundreds of possible sites. In 2003 and the following year Parcak conducted expeditions to the possible sites and surveyed them, confirming 132 of them as new archaeological sites, most of which were previously unknown.

From the article “Satellites unearthing ancient Egyptian ruins”:

Parcak’s process weds modern tools with old-fashioned grunt work. The archaeologist studies satellite images stored on a NASA database and plugs in global positioning coordinates for suspected sites, then tramps out to see them. Telltale signs such as raised elevations and pot shards can confirm the images.

As a result, the big picture comes into view.

“We can see patterns in settlements that correspond to the [historical] texts,” Parcak said, “such as if foreign invasions affected the occupation of ancient sites.

Sarah Parcak's book

“We can see where the Romans built over what the Egyptians had built, and where the Coptic Christians built over what the Romans had built.
“It’s an incredible continuity of occupation and reuse.”

The flooding and meanders of the Nile over the millennia dictated where and how ancient Egyptians lived, and the profusion of new data has built a more precise picture of how that worked.
“Surveys give us information about broader ancient settlement patterns, such as patterns of city growth and collapse over time, that excavations do not,” said Parcak, author of a forthcoming book titled “Satellite Remote Sensing and Archaeology.”

The vagaries of climate in the region make satellite technology advantageous, too.

“Certain plants that may indicate sites grow during certain times of the year,” Parcak said, “while sites may only appear during a wet or dry season. This is different everywhere in the world.”
Archaeologists working in much more verdant climates, such as Cambodia and Guatemala, also have used the technology to divine locations of undiscovered ruins.

They have been able to see similarities between the vegetation at known sites and suspected sites that showed up in fine infrared and ultraviolet images covering wide areas of forbidding terrain.

“For the work I do [in Egypt], I need wet season images as wet soil does a better job at detecting sites with the satellite imagery data I use,” Parcak said. “I can pick the exact months I need with the NASA satellite datasets.”

Other ways in which Archaeologists are utelising Satellite Technology:

By stitching together the many high quality satellites images companies like Google, Yahoo and Microsoft have been able to recreate complete 3D models of the globe. This has provided a platform upon which archaeological sites can now be recreated using programs such as Google’s Sketchup.

Digital Karnak
The Digital Karnak Project, built by the University of California at Los Angeles includes a 3D virtual model of the temple of Karnak. This is available in Google Earth, accessible by simply downloading a small Google Earth file (KML).

Rome Reborn
The Rome Reborn project has created 3D digital models illustrating the urban development of ancient Rome from the first settlement in the late Bronze Age (ca. 1000 B.C.) to the depopulation of the city in the early Middle Ages (ca. A.D. 550)

Kom Firin & Google Earth’s PhotoOverlay
The author of this post in OgleEarth descibes how a mobile version of Google Maps was used on a mobile phone to locate the Ramesside temple complex at Kom Firin in the Delta while driving there. Once there, photographs of the site were taken and uploaded into Google Earth to create a 360-degree panorama with clickable hotspots using Google Earth’s PhotoOverlay view.

Archaeological Sites of Afghanistan in Google Earth (ASAGE)
David Thomas, a graduate student at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia, belongs to a team that launched a project called Archaeological Sites of Afghanistan in Google Earth (ASAGE) last year after plans for a survey near the Minaret of Jam had to be abandoned because of the continuing conflict in the region. He and his colleagues decided that making discoveries using computer mice, rather than shovels and trowels, would have to do instead.
Armchair Archaeology

40 year old Satelite Images used to create 3D images
The University of Arkansas is providing archaeologists with satellite imagery as old as 40 years to see what archaeological sites looked like before the spread of cities encroached on them.

With the aid of new technology able to ‘undistort’ the images, a three-dimensional view of what these sites looked like in recent history can be achieved. An atlas of the Middle East will be developed using the new methods enabling integration with modern mapping software such as GoogleEarth to locate areas of interest.

SCA recreating sites in 3D from aerial photography
The Egyptian Supreme Council of Antiquities is currently undertaking a project involving the digital 3D reconstruction of Egypt’s archaeological sites with the aid of aerial photography.

Use of Google Maps & Google Earth on Talking Pyramids
Readers of this blog will be aware that Google Maps are used on each of the Pyramid Fields pages to allow the visitor to explore each of the sites. Each field has a Google map embedded at the top of the page with links to each pyramid in that field. The visitor can click on these links to display the pyramid of their choice or they can explore the field themselves by clicking and dragging and zooming in and out.

Recently I began creating Google Earth tours for each of these sites. A Google Earth file can be downloaded and with Google Earth installed on your computer you can run the tour, stopping it at any time to interact with the site. A video is made of the tour so that photos can be incorporated to add detailed views. Currently only Abu-Roash has the video tour but the other Pyramid Fields will be completed in the near future.

Use of Google Maps & Googe Earth on Pyramid Texts Online
Pyramid Texts Online utilises Google Maps to display specific photos embedded in the map of Saqqara. By placing images on a map of the site, the visitor gains an additional perspective of the site by understanding the location the photo was taken. This page also include Google Earth KML files and a video tour built in Google Earth.

The Varying Quality of Satellite Images

Google Map of Saqqara

Yahoo Map of Saqqara

One of the most advanced Multispectral imaging technologies providing infrared and ultraviolet radiation is provided by the QuickBird satellite, which has been in orbit since 2001. The satellite can collect nearly 29 million square miles of imagery data in a year, and is operated by DigitalGlobe. Next year the company will launch an upgraded version of Quickbird called WorldView2 which will provide even higher resolution imagery.

Google just recently upgraded a lot of it’s images with the photos from their GeoEye satellite, giving a much higher resolution than previous imagery. However, the view of Egypt’s archaeological sites doesn’t appear to have increased in quality.

Sometimes Yahoo Maps can give a more detailed second perspective as they use different satellite imagery taken at a different time of day with differing shadows. I have created two images as a comparison, pictured here on the right. You can visit each page and explore the differences closer for yourself: YahooMaps & GoogeMaps.

Microsoft’s Virtual Earth uses the same source images as Yahoo Maps although they contain a little bit less detail than the Yahoo Maps images. Ryan Jonasson has developed an effective combination of both Virtual Earth and Google Maps in the same window. This is an ideal tool for enthusiasts wanting to explore an area. Any interaction with one map is replicated on the other.

The bird’s-eye view provided by satellite technology is a powerful addition to the expanding tool kit of Archaeologists. The 3D reconstructions created by projects such as Rome Reborn, University of Arkansas, and the Karnak Project are expanding the applications of satelite use into another realm with the addition of a time scale.

The future looks good for looking at the past.

Links:
ArcGIS
DigitalGlobe
Google Earth
Egypt in Google Maps
Egypt in Virtual Earth
Egypt in Yahoo Maps

Virtual Tours of the Pyramid Fields

Vincent — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 04:32:24 +0000

The Boat Pit on the east side of Djedefre's pyramid

When I started this blog at the beginning of the year I did so with the aim of creating a useful resource to provide information about the pyramids. I began by creating the Pyramid Fields pages and offering practical information on each pyramid such as the dimensions, date of construction, as well as an up to date status on if & when it is open to the public and how much it costs to enter. A photograph or diagram of each pyramid was also included along with it’s title in hieroglyphs (if known).

Categories and Tags
As mentioned in a previous post, one of the powerful features of a blog platform is the ‘modular’ way in which information is stored with the use of Categories and Tags. The Pyramid Fields pages also utilise this feature to allow easy access to all relevant information. As an example, all information posted to the blog on the topic of Pyramid of Unas is tagged with “unas“. And because the Pyramid of Unas section of the Saqqara Pyramid Field page has a link to the tag “unas“, then all information that has accumulated on this blog on that subject will be easily accessible via that linked tag.

Satellite Image Maps
The Google Satellite maps that are embedded at the top of each of the Pyramid Fields pages are interactive and provide a present day look at the sites. There are pyramid links along the bottom of the satellite map that refocus the image to show a particular pyramid. At some stage I’ll be upgrading these interactive maps to include photographs as I have done with the Pyramid Texts Online Photos page. These photos from observers on the ground, when positioned appropriately, provide an additional perspective of the area.

Virtual Flybys
Once again I have turned my attention to updating the Pyramid Fields section of this blog. The latest plan is to include a virtual tour of each of the Pyramid Fields to provide a more three dimensional view of the sites. The Google Earth files used in the videos can be downloaded and run on your own computer if you have Google Earth installed. Each file is very small at only a few kb each. Once the file is downloaded simply run the tour (press the F10 key on Windows). If you don’t already have Google Earth, then you can download it for free from Google. The videos can be viewed independently of Google Earth and have some additional multimedia. Incidentally, the first video features me singing.

I’ll be rolling these out progressively starting with the northern most Pyramid Field, Abu Roash and slowly moving south along the Nile until we reach Faiyum.

Visit the Abu Roash page to download the Google Earth file.