South Korea Releases High Resolution Spy Satellite Photo of Pyongyang
In a game of oneupmanship, the ROK has released a much higher resolution spy satellite photograph of Pyongyang than the one the North Koreans released of Seoul:
South Korea on Thursday released a photo of Pyongyang taken from one of its own satellites after North Korea published imagery of Seoul using what it claimed was a military spy satellite.
The color photo, taken with “land satellite No. 1,” clearly shows Kim Il-sung Square and its surrounding facilities, including a history museum, an art museum and a department store.
By contrast, the North Korean photo released Monday was in black and white, and barely showed the outlines of bridges across the Han River and a port in the western city of Incheon.
The North’s Korean Central News Agency said the camera fitted on the “test-piece satellite” built for military reconnaissance purposes had a resolution of 20 meters.
Experts here said a reconnaissance satellite must have a resolution of at least 0.5m, making the North’s equipment impossible to use for its stated purpose.
Yonhap
You can read more at the link, but give the North Koreans time and they will probably get a high resolution spy satellite eventually into orbit as well.
The photo released by the RoK probably means they can read the license plates on cars from space
Nobody ever releases the best they have. Not even the Norks.
Your 400 dollar Samsung can recognize a face at night more than 100 meters away with a plastic lens smaller than your pupil.
Safe to say satallites have better optics.
…especially since in 1979, we could differentiate Ayatollahs from space.
Protip: the magic is less in the hardware than the software these days.
I learned that the hard way some years ago… bought a really nice lab-grade video camera and optics for a project… much higher rez than a phone, lower light, all setting addressable by register.
The picture sucked.
I wound up getting the results i wanted by machining an adapter to mount a Galaxy S7 on the optics and sending the video out over wifi.
I still use this and a bunch of money sits in a box waiting for me to write software I never will because old smartphones work better than new cameras (if you have good optics on the front end and good software on the backend (which is easy to write (or use photoshop)).
The fancy SLRs probably work better but phones work so well, there is no need to try.