New Mexico wind farms
Photo (© Jay Dugger)
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Google Earth Screenshot
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Wind farm, Quay County, New Mexico
Here's an unusual pair of aerial images from Flickr user Jay Dugger. They're unusual in the sense that they are panoramas - multiple images stitched together to create a wider view of a scene. Taking panoramic photographs is difficult on the ground, because it's important to keep the camera stationary to avoid parallax errors. Doing a panorama through a plane window is even more difficult, because the plane of course is moving, and the shots will by definition be taken from slightly different angles. Jay Dugger has done a great job overcoming these problems, stitching together what looks to be four-frame and seven-frame paroramas to produce high-resolution scenes with no visible stitching artifacts. Both images show wind farms, an increasingly common renewable energy source in the American southwest. The images are sharp enough to show the individual windmills in good detail. The first image comes from Quay County, New Mexico, showing a wind farm build along the upper slopes of a 300-foot west-facing ridge.
The next image, stiched together horizontally to cover a distance of about ten miles, shows a wind farm on the Argonne Mesa in Guadalupe County, New Mexico. The windmills here are constructed on a plateau that sits about 150 feet above the flatter land at the bottom of the photo. Notice that the windmills aren't visible in the Google Earth image - the wind farm has been constructed since Google's satellite imagery was taken. Be sure to see the high-resolution versions of both of these photos - there's lots more detail in the original images.
Photos taken: March 2, 2007
Photos by: Jay Dugger
Route: Albuquerque to Dallas
