On LEAFFEST’s gorgeous Saturday, we invaded the Bread Loaf Campus of Middlebury College on a plateau in the Green Mountains at 1450 feet above sea level. The Campus is mostly empty at this time of year, so our invasion was unopposed and also pretty much unnoticed. There was a variable south wind so we tried a few different kites, and I settled on a Levitation Delta for lifting KAP rigs. During one of the flights, a radio controlled (RC) pan/tilt rig with a Canon S95 was augmented with two instruments. We strapped on a Garmin Forerunner 305 GPS watch which was recording lat, long, and altitude every few (?) seconds. We also lashed on a Jeenode with sensors for temperature, barometric pressure, and acceleration. The Jeenode data were saved to an SD card every second (?).

Galen was operating the RC transmitter which allowed him to point the camera anywhere between the horizon and almost straight down and trigger the shutter of the S95. The hastily mounted Jeenode prevented the camera from tilting any farther down, so most of the vertical shots taken are not quite vertical. But Galen did a great job getting mapping coverage of most of the campus and also lots of attractive oblique shots of the early fall color and incredibly yellow historic buildings. Some of the shots are above in a gallery, and below is an embed from MapKnitter with 16 photos aligned into a reasonable facsimile of an orthophoto.

On Saturday evening the GPS and sensor data were passed around and in a flurry of Python code some 3D visualizations of the GPS data, and 2D graphs of the temperature, pressure, and altitude emerged. Those graphics might appear in a research note soon. Maybe some of them can be presented hovering over the MapKnitter map below which includes the entire surface area covered during the flight. To download a GeoTIFF, JPG, or tile set of the MapKnitter image, go here: https://mapknitter.org/map/view/breadloaf-leaffest.