On May 5 my Public Laboratory infrared camera made its first photographic flight. The shutters of two Powershot A495 cameras, one modified to record only near-infrared (NIR) light, were triggered every 10 seconds by an AuRiCo KAP controller. The Levitation delta kite hoisted the rig over the northern edge of the Salisbury Swamp, VT. In about 1.5 hours, 420 synchronous pairs of normal and NIR photos were captured. It has taken a while to process just a fraction of these images, but the results are promising.

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This was a bit lost in the hubbub over the Google announcement, but a few weeks ago we added a feature to order a print directly from MapKnitter and from the PLOTS map archive. Users can now click-through directly from their map details page. Public Laboratory map production is working towards a end-to-end open source solution:

• Planning. Getting started with Public Lab map tools, collaborate, learn about safety first
• Capture. Taking aerial images
• Sorting. Selecting the best images locally or online with mapmill.org

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I got the MK111 timer all wired up and integrated into the PLOTS Visible/NIR Camera Tool payload. I still have to endurance test the two 4LR44 batteries, but I will wait to do that in the air -- no reason to waste two $1 batteries and not get any aerial photos.

cross-posted from PBS's IdeaLab. How We Got Here: The Road to Public Lab's Map Project

Last week, Public Laboratory announced that public domain maps are now starting to show up on Google Earth and Google Maps. But how did the projects get there? Here's a timeline of a Public Laboratory map project.

MAKING A MAP

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To date, the documentation and open science literature we've made as a community has been published under a Creative Commons ShareAlike license, allowing anyone to reuse, remix, adapt, improve, and redistribute our works. Today, the PLOTS Web working group would like to propose that we as a community adopt a separate license for our hardware designs, and after much consultation, we'd like to adopt the CERN Open Hardware License.

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Here is a prototype rig that performed well on its maiden flight. The design might be appropriate for matched visible/IR cameras for vertical photography, like the Canon A495s from the Balloon Mapping Kickstarter project. For such a use, it would require the addition of an intervalometer to trigger both cameras simultaneously. I am not yet sure how to add that function.

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Alex Mandel, Michele Tobias, and a couple of others photographed the foredunes at Pacifica State Beach in Pacifica, CA, using a kite aerial photography rig. The kite was a Skyhook 30 outfitted with an SLR camera. The wind was strong - about 25-30 miles an hour - which allowed the kite to lift the heavier camera. The flight went well, but there were some minor concerns. The biggest concern was that this kite needs a more substantial tail than we had (a home-made drogue tail about 15 inches long) in higher winds to keep it from waggling back and forth, swinging the camera.

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A Picavet rig is a very common type of KAP/BAP rig, I've added it to the juice bottle in a fairly simple way, using 1/2" key rings.

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This is Aurora Tang's method of sealing up her balloons. I think its the best I've seen. It was developed during a project to document Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty with the Getty Institute. She has used it extensively for landscape photography.

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We held a Ballon Mapping and Kite Making Workshop on the Campus of San Marcos on Jan. 28, 2012 with a group of about 10 people from: Open Street Map Peru, Saberes Nomadas, and San Marcos Univ. (physics, geography, sociology, and geographic engineering depts.)

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