New book shows New Zealand from above

By GILBERT WONG

Our thanks should go to SPOT for these images. No, not the late lamented phone company mascot. SPOT stands for Satellite pour l'Observation de la Terre.

The four French satellites circle the Earth eyeing us from 830km in space. Along with images taken by two other satellites, the Indian Remote Sensing Satellite and Landsat 7, cartographer Barry Barclay has employed a judicious mix of art and science to produce images of this country that we can quite confidently state have never been seen before.

In New Zealand from Space (Penguin, $49.95), the analogy is made between the United States Department of Defence ARPAnet project, an attempt to protect computer systems from the electronic pulses accompanying nuclear attack, and the technology behind these images.

ARPAnet evolved into the internet. Satellites, too were once primarily a military technology, a way to scan the globe for potential nuclear launch sites and other military threats. Since the demise of the Cold War, satellites with their omniscient perspective have been welcomed by oceanographers, weather forecasters, environmental planners, geologists, geographers and, not least, cartographers.

The images in the pages are not photographs. They are digital composites constructed from a multitude of sources and then "coloured" to reveal the bush and pine and other flora, the geology, rivers, lakes and coastal waters, the rugged terrain thrust up from Gondwanaland millennia ago.

Unlike photographs, they can digitally capture the three dimensions we occupy. So these images are both highly accurate and ingeniously stylised.

SPOT "sees" in three bands of the spectrum, green, red and infra-red and is sharp enough so that one pixel of each image equates to 20 sq m. So, yes, technically the clarity is fine enough to let someone spy on your house, but who would want to?