Great Stuff! But what can I do with it?

• Choose a poster of your area. Locate your house, school, and other points of interest. How far apart are these? If these locations are in a city, you may be able to count the blocks, if in an agricultural area, you may be able to see the mile section lines. Which direction is north? Which direction would you go to get from point to point? You might be able to use a ruler and protractor to make these measurements. If the image is in the infrared, what can you tell about the area you have chosen to examine. What are the areas which appear in red? In gray? In black? What time of year was the image captured? Please note that tutorials are available with which you may decipher infrared images.

•Examine images with NIH Image. If you are unfamiliar with NIH Image, refer to the CASDE tutorial for an introduction. Workshops are also available from CIPE; contact them at 1-800-322-9884. Measurment and angle tools are available to help define distance and direction in your image. Find the perimeter and area of a lake within the image. Convert your image to gray-scale and stretch or contrast the image and observe the results. Additional features may be seen (or hidden) with these techniques. Image processing tools and personnel proved invaluable during the 'Cuban Missile Crisis'. Stretch an image of a Cuban location. What did you find? What do missile silos look like? Try examining portions of Banner County in Nebraska for silos.

•VistaPro is a tool which may be used to generate 3-D landscapes and virtual flights. Open your choice of 'dem' images from Virtual Nebraska and 'render' the 'Landscape'. You may select the camera location, direction and image quality. Try adding water and see what happens to the flood plain or generate lakes or rivers where none exist currently. Tutorials are available for these procedures for both the Mac and PC. You may establish locations on the 'dem' and generate a virtual flight over the terrain which you select. The 'terrain' might be population information, underground water, center pivots, potential pollution and other useful data. Again, tutorials are available for location and flight generation.

•DataSlate is a free tool invented by engineers at JPL. It is capable of showing and magnifying images and selecting portions of 'layered' images for contrast and comparison. The layers may include infrared, radar, natural and images captured at different times. Magnification is not done by enlarging pixels but by choosing higher resolution images. See what happens when Republican City, NE goes under water. Watch the evolution of the growth of the golf course in Grand Island. Tools are available which will allow the user to set a scale, and measure distances and angles. Windows are provided with information on the locations, types of images, and what they show, annotations and panoramic views. You will be able to send your own images to CASDE and have them saved in the proper format for loading into DataSlate. You could provide information for the windows, annotate details within your data sets. Overlay your images of an 'Earthworm'. Natural view, exploded view, annotated view.... these could be some images of choice. Historical studies might involve searching for images from the Oregon Trail. Some images show variations in vegetation in different soil compactions which could indicate tracks.

•Try the tools and tutorials with the samples, with your images and then perhaps extend the current exercises or invent new ones.