Introduction

Here we present some photographs we made along the Altyn Tagh in the area of Seurkuli Valley (38° 46.709'N 091° 15.238' E) of a series of offset channels and other landforms that make up the moletrack here. This is part of our ongoing work on earthquake geology along the ATF.
Go to our main ATF page.

I will try to write more about our kite system, but it consists of a radio triggered Olympus 340 digital camera (or it can fly with a small film camera) lifted by a large (32 ft² or 16ft²) Flowform kite.

We are still developing the system. You can see some very nice images of the Landers earthquake scarp at this link:
http://activetectonics.la.asu.edu/Landers/index.html

Kite action

Ramon flying the kite	Ramon and Lao Sun flying	The beauty of flight

Checking the results on that little LCD	The crash of Eagle Eye 1	A vertical system makes the killer oblique!

The pilot and triggerman

The best image

Note the vehicle, occasional people, a total station, and some 60" aerial photo targets in these pictures. The channel in the center is left laterally offset about 11 m along the Altyn Taugh Fault whose moletrack is the linear feature crossing the image from upper left to lower right.

Other images

Processing study on the best image

Here is an effort to explore the basic Adobe Photoshop processing steps one might do and their effect on the result. I am still not completely satisfied.

The original (right out of the camera I think)	Basic stretch	A bit more refined stretching

The refined stretch sharpened	The refined stretch despeckled