Eye of the desertIn 1980, artist Tom Van Sant made the Mojave Desert wink. As part of an effort to c

Eye of the desertIn 1980, artist Tom Van Sant made the Mojave Desert wink. As part of an effort to celebrate the bicentennial of the city of Los Angeles, the artist was commissioned to produce this image in the desert using the Landsat 3spacecraft.This image, supposed to resemble an eye, was created using a series of 90 perfectly positioned mirrors. The artist worked with scientists from the USGS and Stanford to calculate the exact position of each mirror by including the rotational speed of the earth, the velocity of the spacecraft, and the position of the sun.Each mirror had to be accurately positioned to better than 1/10th of a degree in order to produce the over-exposure effect on the spacecraft’s camera. Each mirror was only 2 feet by 2 feet square, and the mirrors covered an area 2.5 kilometers wide.-JBBImage credit: NASA/USGS/Landsathttp://landsat.gsfc.nasa.gov/?p=9153 -- source link

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