Eyes on Earth Episode 97 – EROS 50th: Earth As Art

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Tom Adamson

Hello, everyone, and welcome to another episode of Eyes on Earth, a podcast produced at the USGS Arrow Center, which celebrates its 50th anniversary this year. Our podcast focuses on our ever changing planet and on the people here at Eros and across the globe who use remote sensing to monitor and study the health of Earth. My name is Tom Adams and your host for this episode.

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Tom Adamson

Earth as Art is an example of the initiative and creativity of Arrow staff. The project shows that in addition to their scientific value, many satellite images capture an incredible variety of views of Earth and are simply intriguing to look at. And you can download the Earth desired images for free from our website. Now we're going to talk about how that project got started back in the previous millennium.

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Tom Adamson

It began in 1999 with our three guests for this episode. John Christopherson is a principal system engineer. Ron Hayes is a digital data technical lead. And Pat Scaramucci is a senior scientist. All of them work at the USGS Arrow Center. So what were your jobs at Arrow's at the time that Earth Desert got started?

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Jon Christopherson

I was the quality assurance lead for Landsat seven barrels. What that meant basically was heading up the calibration team and making sure that Landsat was operating as intended and meeting the goals of well well-calibrated satellite.

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Tom Adamson

So John, Landsat seven had just launched in 1999, right?

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Jon Christopherson

Right. April 15th, 1999.

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Tom Adamson

And the job that you and Ron and Pat had was calibrating the satellites. Can one of you talk just a little bit more about what that involves.

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Pat

Calibrating them as a matter of getting the numbers that are coming down from the satellites and checking them against our known sources. We have black bodies and measurements on the ground and making sure that the numbers convert to a scientifically useful number with units of radiant swaths per square meter, straight and so on. But we were doing QA back then, which is more a matter of just looking at the seams.

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Tom Adamson

Q A quality assurance, huh?

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Pat

And the quality assurance was the more fun part of the job.

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Jon Christopherson

You have to remember that back then, the size of one Landsat image meant that it had to spend quite a bit of time in processing and was even a little bit tough to open up on. Well, a lot of the pieces people had out here. These guys had great big machines, could open them up and look at them.

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Jon Christopherson

And we also had sort of a back door to the pipeline processing where we could look at various images, you know, just thumbnails of them and see them in the ones that we thought were interesting. We a lot of people more.

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Tom Adamson

Landsat data was not free and open at the time. No. And besides that, yeah, in 1999, people probably didn't have computers that could readily and quickly open up a Landsat image like we can now.

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Ron Hayes

Yeah. Within minutes, you know, within maybe an hour after the image was taken, we could actually view the image, you know, near real time. So that was that was something unheard of back then.

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Tom Adamson

Yeah. That was not something that the public certainly could do at that time. But at Arrow, you could do it within hours.

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Jon Christopherson

Right now we had available to us a system called the Image Assessment System, a fairly powerful computer at that time. Of course, by today's standards, perhaps not, but it was a fairly powerful computer at that time that could get these first quick looks at data, the image processing, ordering, system archiving and processing ordering system materials was always quite a bit slower than that.

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Jon Christopherson

It would take, you know, at least a day or two or three to get the images available to the public, whereas we had this system that could look at them quickly. And because of that, we got to look at things kind of first and see what was available was exciting.

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Pat

The image accessing the system is still operational. It's been upgraded a bit since then. I still use it every once in a while.

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Ron Hayes

So we viewed a lot of images throughout the world and we started noticing that there are some images throughout the world that are pretty cool to look at and I think Pat has the most artistic eye and he kept looking at these things and calling us over and saying, Look at this one. And then he'd squirreled away and put it in, you know, in a folder and then, you know, take a look at the images using the electrical magnetic spectrum and different band combinations.

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Ron Hayes

And you could get some pretty outstanding looking pictures that really resembled in more of an art scene than anything. So we just started to print them out and hanging on the wall. Remember that?

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Jon Christopherson

Yeah. Yeah. Pat had the most images. His job was to look at random ones. He kept finding these amazing images. But one of our goals was to, you know, through the color combinations of using, you know, regions of the spectrum that our eyes can't see. But we can with the satellite. So we pull those in and then end up with a product that looked just fascinating.

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Jon Christopherson

It was art that people wouldn't know, that they were looking at a satellite image of Earth.

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Tom Adamson

What did people think when you would hang them on the wall by your cubicles or by your offices? What did people think of those?

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Pat

For a while, we kept getting requests to hang more oil outside their office and so on.

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Jon Christopherson

Yeah. Now.

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Tom Adamson

And this is just taking place within Eros. You know, this this is just sort of you all in your workspaces displaying some really interesting images.

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Jon Christopherson

Yeah, it would draw a crowd often, you know, there'd be several people outside standing and looking at it every time we operated out. It was fun.

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Tom Adamson

And then what did you think could come of this collection of images that you had?

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Jon Christopherson

We'd all keep writing these two CD-ROMs. And we ordered and got some big old binders we'd call them just Landsat Seven's greatest hits. Among those were the artistic ones, in addition to other types of images that we found fascinating. We talked among ourselves and over, you know, random musings of maybe getting a coffee table book. But the US government can't publish coffee table books.

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Jon Christopherson

That's not taxpayer dollars sort of thing. So we just kept screwing them away. And then one day, the fellow from the German space agency, the director of the world fart the ah, he was in the middle of putting together a coffee table. What? I guess the German space agency can do that. And he had stopped at a Goddard and he was out at JPL, and he didn't know if he had been images or not.

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Jon Christopherson

And I think we just could do a coffee table book. He stopped. They said you should stop it, Eros. We stopped at Eros. We met up with him. He said within 15 minutes I knew I had a book.

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Tom Adamson

He was looking around at NASA's Goddard. He was looking around at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at some maybe satellite images of Earth that they had. Oh, sure. But then what we had at Arras with Landsat seven, that's what really build out whatever his project was.

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Jon Christopherson

Write the book they came up with, couldn't speak Urdu, which is German for now. Earth is art, had images of many different types, radar images, other types and so on. But the Landsat imagery really fell out of that book, mostly the ones that we had squirreled away.

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Pat

Yeah, I think actually we started the Earth as our project before he showed up, John because I remember working on some scenes for Earth, his art, and he was standing next to me. He says, Give me that now. I said, Well, it's not done yet. I'll mail it to you as soon as it's finished.

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Jon Christopherson

Yeah.

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Pat

But yeah, we were in the process of creating images for the Earth, his art show when he showed up.

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Tom Adamson

Okay, so at the same time, you were thinking of an art show to use with these images one.

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Jon Christopherson

Day, Pat just said, I just want to rent a gallery space and show these to people. There's two beautiful. And I went in and talked to a fellow about showing these at the Washington Pavillion of Arts and Sciences, a local establishment here in Sioux Falls, because the Earth is already is really an interesting combination of Earth and, you know, of art and science.

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Jon Christopherson

And this is a perfect venue for it. He said that he would sponsor getting these printed out in super high quality photographic prints and framing them. And he called his contacts at the Washington Pavilion and they said, Sure. And they scheduled us in.

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Ron Hayes

We had to, you know, put these images together in a nice presentation. And so we had a, you know, worked with our art department here. They're awesome. And they, you know, printed a mountain and made frames for them. And then we had a little description of what each one was, a little name for the the scene. And then something, you know, geographical about that image.

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Ron Hayes

So when people first looked at it, they would admire it for the art and then they read about it and they learned something about that area of the world.

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Tom Adamson

Do you have any remembrances of how that show at the Washington Pavilion went over?

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Pat

Yeah, people loved it. There were there were a lot of people that first night when we were there, we gave a short presentation about how we created the images.

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Jon Christopherson

One of the things I remember from that artist reception, that first showing of it, you Pat, you came up and said that there was a little kid. Somebody brought the kids there and he saw one of those pictures and he said, Look, mommy, they had spider bad spider. And you said, yes, that is exactly what I wanted them to look at it as art.

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Jon Christopherson

That was cool.

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Pat

That was one of Ron's scenes. I forget the name of the scene, but it was an inland delta in the Amazon region. So the Delta looked like a spider web.

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Ron Hayes

Yeah, that was Piranha River Delta down in South America.

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Tom Adamson

This kind of took off and became popular rather quickly after that. And as I understand it, John was getting some attention from some news outlets.

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Jon Christopherson

The popularity took off better than any of us had ever thought. We thought, you know, if we can make the whole duration of the Washington Pavilion exhibit, great. But they brought people from DC and they saw it. They said, Oh, yes, we got to have a copy of this. So another copy was made framed and everything and sent off and it was hung at the USGS where some other people saw it and they said, We've got to show this on Capitol Hill.

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Jon Christopherson

And so they showed it in one of the House office buildings, and then it went in to the Library of Congress and a couple of traveling exhibits started going, I don't know how many places about Earth as art now is sort of traveling far and wide, because I think somebody had interviewed me or interviewed us on my name, got stuck in an article about it.

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Jon Christopherson

People kept calling. I got called and interviewed by CNN, Associated Press. And, you know, once again, an AP that sort of goes all over the place. People were emailing me from Italy. Is this, you know, sending me the Italian copy of this? And Brazil, the Munich Daily paper, had the morning paper one morning. It was just fascinating how much wider this thing spread that any of us ever thought.

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Jon Christopherson

It was astounding.

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Tom Adamson

There was one of the articles that said, I don't know if I'm going to get the quote right, the whole sentence or the whole context of the quote was. But there was a news article that quoted John as saying, some of these images just grab you by the eyeballs.

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Jon Christopherson

Oh, and I got grief from that. Oh, please. I was working a project at the time with Boeing, you know, from Aero. So I was the liaison to people at Boeing. I got called that morning. There was a conference room full of all going, Hey, giant, don't grab us by our eyeballs. We got a tease where, you know.

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Tom Adamson

It's kind of a nice description of how that works, though. You see some of these images and you can't stop looking at it.

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Jon Christopherson

Yeah, it just. Whoa, What's that? You know, or what's happening here? That's what the scientists do with Landsat imagery every day. Look and understand what's happening here.

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Tom Adamson

So what do you all think is the main benefit of Earth as art in terms of making people aware of the value of remote sensing imagery?

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Ron Hayes

Well, I think it gets people excited about, you know, what they're looking at and it makes them want to learn a little bit more about that image initially. And then when they started looking into it and looking at the collection and then other collections of users, what six collections of Earth is art now? Yeah, you start to, you know, learn more about the planet that you live on and it is so fascinating to read about all these places around the world.

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Tom Adamson

Yeah, and that's kind of what we're all about at Eros is identifying change over time and just describing those changes, studying those changes in a geographic way, in a scientific way. These earth as art images are sort of the gateway for the public to get interested in that work.

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Jon Christopherson

I'm just astounded that there's now six generations of this art out there and they keep coming up with more.

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Tom Adamson

Now that first collection, Earth as Art One, won an award within the USGS. It won the USGS Shoemaker Award for Communication Excellence in 2003. That award is named after Eugene Shoemaker. It recognizes USGS products. I'm quoting from the description now, products that demonstrate extraordinary effectiveness in communicating and translating complex scientific concepts and discoveries into words and pictures that capture the interest and imagination of the American public.

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Tom Adamson

That's what you all started. That's what you accomplished with Earth. Is art a stunningly visual product that grabs the public's attention and then that leads to conversations about the value of remote sensing with satellites. You three really worked on Earth as our one got it started and let it sort of, you know, move away from home, graduate from college, and have a life of its own.

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Jon Christopherson

That's a good way to look at it. There's a cute description, you know, about the time that we got all used to seeing aerial imagery and astronaut imagery of the earth and so on. It started to become a little ho hum. But then we get an instrument up there that can see in other parts of the spectrum that our eyes can't see.

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Jon Christopherson

Oh, no, There's still a world of mystery for you, you know, on amazement. And that's kind of cool lensing. It allows us to see things that we couldn't see ourselves.

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Tom Adamson

Thank you, John, Ron and Pat for joining us on this episode of Eyes on Earth and talking about the Earth as art origin story. And thank you, listeners. Check out our era's Facebook and Twitter pages to watch for our newest episodes. And you can subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts. This podcast. This podcast. This podcast.

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Unknown

This podcast. This podcast is a product of the US Geological Survey. Department of Interior.