The Chesapeake Bay in the Nov 2, 1982 Landsat image

The Nov 2, 1982 Landsat image covers much of the Chesapeake Bay. The Thematic Mapper bands may be combined in various ways. The following image shows every pixel of bands 4, 3, and 1 combined as red, green, and blue to give a color IR view.


IR (4,3,1), resulting image size: 800 x 800, starting pixel = (4160,1020), subsample factor = 1.

Some sediment is visible in the bay. Hart-Miller Island is an artificial island which is being filled by harbor dredgings, a small plume of sediment is seen escaping.

Some Thematic Mapper bands show features in the water areas better than others. In the following image bands 3, 2, and 1 are used as red, green, and blue (instead of 4,3,1). It is possible to process the image to better show the sediment in the water. However, scaling to bring out water details gives a poor scaling for land features. One way around this is to scale land and water differently. Band 5 of this image may be thresholded to separate land and water. This was done to allow separate scaling for land and water in the following image. A black border was inserted between the regions of the different scalings.

Vis (3,2,1), resulting image size: 800 x 800, starting pixel = (4160,1020), subsample factor = 1.

A number of long thin ship wakes are visible in this image. The water portions of the image were stretched more strongly than the land and show some of the artifacts in the data. With image filtering techniques it may be possible to reduce these artifacts somewhat. The land areas show roughly the true color, that is, what the eye would see.