For a long time, geographers and scientists have gathered information from afar, relying on technologies like telescopes or balloon photography. How did the rise of computer-aided cartography change this process of remote sensing?
Remote sensing was practiced as early as the 1850s, when hobbyists and photographers affixed cameras to balloons and kites and sent them into the air to capture so-called “bird’s eye views.” These methods could reveal cities, even whole regions, in a single image—but our bird’s eye views got even sharper in the mid-twentieth century, when launching satellites into the earth’s orbit allowed us to observe landscapes from a much more remote perspective.