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What you will learn in Earth Observation and Remote Sensing

1. Seeing without touching
A satellite measures light it did not touch the ground to collect. The atmosphere lets some wavelengths through and stops others, and every Earth-observing band sits in one of the gaps — except the one built to sit in a wall on purpose.
2. Building the image
Seven bands from one real Landsat scene of a burnt Californian hillside. Assign any band to any screen colour and the same ground gives true colour, colour infrared, a burn map and a heat map — all different, all true.
3. Turning bands into numbers
Compute NDVI yourself, pixel by pixel, then across a scene and through a Punjab wheat season. Then watch it fail: it saturates in a thick canopy, it is fooled by bright soil, and it cannot tell a shrubland from a wheat field.
4. Four resolutions and an orbit
Spatial, spectral, temporal and radiometric resolution pull against each other. Five real instruments, four real jobs, and the sharpest sensor of all fails to follow a cyclone.
5. Ground truth, and reading data honestly
Query a real earthquake catalogue, read what it says about itself, and state a result with its uncertainty. Learn the processing levels that stand between a radiance and a number, see the sea-ice disagreement from the retrieval side, and find what is wrong with six real images.

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1. Seeing without touching
A satellite measures light it did not touch the ground to collect. The atmosphere lets some wavelengths through and stops others, and every Earth-observing band sits in one of the gaps — except the one built to sit in a wall on purpose.
2. Building the image
Seven bands from one real Landsat scene of a burnt Californian hillside. Assign any band to any screen colour and the same ground gives true colour, colour infrared, a burn map and a heat map — all different, all true.
3. Turning bands into numbers
Compute NDVI yourself, pixel by pixel, then across a scene and through a Punjab wheat season. Then watch it fail: it saturates in a thick canopy, it is fooled by bright soil, and it cannot tell a shrubland from a wheat field.
4. Four resolutions and an orbit
Spatial, spectral, temporal and radiometric resolution pull against each other. Five real instruments, four real jobs, and the sharpest sensor of all fails to follow a cyclone.
5. Ground truth, and reading data honestly
Query a real earthquake catalogue, read what it says about itself, and state a result with its uncertainty. Learn the processing levels that stand between a radiance and a number, see the sea-ice disagreement from the retrieval side, and find what is wrong with six real images.