All posts by Gavin Schrock
The Clock(s) at the Center of the Universe
To provide precise global time, critical to our digital world, the United States Naval Observatory serves as the major node in a worldwide array of synchronized atomic clocks. For all but a relatively few astronomers and scientists, the universe of humans centers around our earthbound activities and our heuristic sense of time – day, night, seasons,...
EagleView
The practical side of on-demand aerial image analytics, with an interview of CEO and president Chris Barrow. A contractor showed up at my house to give an estimate for a long overdue roof replacement. He hadn’t pulled out a ladder, so I asked if he needed mine. His response was, “Since we started using EagleView,...
Feature: Hydrographic Research and Development
From Science and Engineering to Your Hydrographic Toolkit “The complexities of and incubation times for advancing instrumentation are often not fully appreciate ”—T. Curtin, E. Belcher, Innovation in Oceanographic Instrumentation (2008) Extraordinary—yet mostly unseen—innovations continue to shape the tools surveyors use on water and land: innovations in science and engineering for hydrography, oceanography, robotics, and global navigation...
PPP: IGS Announces the Launch of RTS-IGS
If anything underscores the fact that high-precision, global, real-time GNSS is real, viable, and here for the long run, it is the news that the International GNSS Service (IGS) has launched an open access real-time precise-point-positioning (PPP) service. While a few years behind some commercial (and sometimes proprietary) real-time PPP services, this international cooperative of...
Motor Sports: High Speed from High Precision
From the Gasoline Alley of Alberta, Canada to the famous Gasoline Alley of the Indianapolis 500, an ambitious surveyor has brought pioneering solutions in trackside scanning and metrology to the world of international motor sports. “A wise man will make more opportunities than he finds” —Sir Francis Bacon These 1,600-pound cars reach speeds upwards of 220...
Erick Schonstedt: The Schonstedt Legacy
For 60 years, the life work of Erick Schonstedt has been shining though the company and its exemplary instrumentation produced for surveying, geosciences, space exploration, and humanitarian causes. “MAGNETISM, n. – Something acting upon a magnet. The definition is condensed from the works of one thousand eminent scientists, who have illuminated the subject with a great white...
