VicSouth Desert Spring Star Party

Below are portions of MODIS true colour images, centred on the Little Desert Lodge and showing daytime cloud cover during VicSouth 2008. Resolution of these portions is 250 metres per pixel, ie: each image covers a 200x150km rectangle.

The thin vertical black line is the border between SA and Vic (added by the MODIS image processing). The horizontal bullet-shaped patch is the Little Desert National Park. The dark patch near the bottom right corner is the Grampians National Park. The larger blotchy light/dark area in the upper left are the adjoining Big Desert (in Vic) and Ngarkat (in SA) National Parks.

The MODIS instrument flies aboard two satellites, Terra and Aqua, which are in sun-synchronous and nearly polar orbits. During the daytime half of their orbits each satellite images a continuous swath of the Earth passing below it. Terra produces a mid-morning (local time) image, Aqua produces a mid-afternoon image. The MODIS website posts these raw image swathes within a few minutes of receipt. The website also automatically processes these image swathes into standardised, geometrically-corrected views of most of the Earth's landmasses -- including various parts of Australia.

The Friday morning Terra image.

The Friday afternoon Aqua image.

The Saturday morning Terra image.

The Saturday afternoon Aqua image. Some bushfire smoke is drifting across Little Desert.

The Sunday morning Terra image.

The Sunday afternoon Aqua image.

The Monday morning Terra image.

VicSouth home page : www.vicsouth.info