Small airplane caught on satellite camera

 kw: interesting things, satellite imagery

I do many geographical investigations for my work at the Delaware Museum of Nature and Science. Today, looking on Google Maps for a certain geographic feature that was reported "North of the Miami-Dade County line", I saw this:

What I actually saw at first was a row of three white dots. Upon zooming in, I could see it was three views of a small airplane. The dashed line is the county line I was following. It is evident that the satellite was taking strip images from north to south, and three in a row caught the airplane as it passed to the southwest. You can see this for yourself; type in to Google Maps (or in Google Earth) these coordinates: 25.95717 -80.65822. Be sure to put a space before the hyphen so the numbers are correctly interpreted as coordinates. This image was produced 1/4/2021, so later this year we can expect a newer image to replace it. Never fear: the "historical imagery" button will let you backtrack to the date of your choice.

Zooming in further, we can glean a little information about the photographic method used:

The rainbow effect shows that the satellite doesn't operate like a digital camera, but takes successive images through color filters. In this case, we can see at least blue, cyan, green, yellow and red, although the cyan and yellow colors may result from overlap of blue, green and red. Google Maps allows taking a measurements of the airplane: wing span 40.5 feet, length 35.5 feet. Airplane buffs can look up what kind of plane this is likely to be.