Comment by nullhole
19 hours ago
I had an idea for survey planes once. During calibration, they fly grid patterns, basically like a hashmark (#), to get overlapping data for comparison.
Doing that kind of flight at night (makes sense for lidar! not so much for photo..), against a clear sky with at least some stars, and stacking the resulting photos, would give you a grid pattern of green/red/white aircraft running lights in front of the heavens.
The overlapping pattern is! the flight pattern. The overlap is not some calibration artifact, it is the product for any sort of stereo evaluation.
I happen to live at the crossing of two major flight lines, E-W and N-S, so I might actually attempt to do that. Maybe a lot of 1 tenth exposures could be enough. Trial and errors to get started, as usual.