On 4/19/2014 11:20 PM, Wayne.B wrote:
On Sat, 19 Apr 2014 23:12:50 -0400, wrote:

On Sat, 19 Apr 2014 22:36:37 -0400, "Mr. Luddite"
wrote:

Here's a game for you Harry.

It's a "hi res" Google satellite image of the 61 million square miles
of the Pacific Ocean.

I zoomed in close enough to draw a fairly wide, bright red line that is
605 feet long (all to scale) and saved it on the image. I then zoomed
back out to capture the full Pacific again and took a screen capture of it.

You mission, should you chose to accept it, is to find the red line.
You can save the picture and zoom away. It's there, guarantee it.
I know where it is, so I can zoom in and easily find it.

Can you?

http://i802.photobucket.com/albums/y...ch/Pacific.jpg


I bet the computers at DIA would pluck it out in a second or two. The
reason they didn't see the jet was they did not have the algorithm in
there to look for random debris.

===

And it's entirely possible, even likely, that there was no satellite
in the right position at the right time. Satellites are not all that
useful for real time tracking of fast moving targets.


That's the point I am trying to make. "Spy" satellites have optics that
can resolve dimples on a golf ball but you have to know where the golf
ball is to zoom in on it. Land targets are one thing because they don't
move and the GPS coordinates are known. A ship at sea would be very
difficult to find unless you had a good idea where to look and could
limit the search to a highly zoomed area. Oceans are big.