subject: Sights Of The City Aerial Mapping Manchester And The New Millennium [print this page] Mapping technology has moved forward in great leaps and bounds, these last few years. Like everything Internet, its found a rapidly evolving home on the web, a platform from which to display the ever more complex and useful applications of digital mapping, LiDAR assisted map generation, digital aerial photography, and so on. Aided, too, by the promotional drive of Get Mapping, Britains premier online map location (Get Mapping use two of the countrys most sophisticated behind the scenes aerial experts to generate their stuff), map projects like the aerial mapping Manchester drive theyve recently completed, are getting plenty of play in press and online forums.
Aerial mapping, now its being done to such an extraordinary degree of accuracy and detail, is hugely useful for any number of applications. Town planning alone is probably unable to remember a time before the kind of sophisticated aerial coverage were all now used to, took place. Developing detailed digital images of areas slated for development, rebuild or demolition allows town planning agencies to make highly informed recommendations regarding suitability, cost and legislation. This alone has driven the aerial mapping Manchester project to new heights of completeness with the unparalleled accuracy of Get Mappings citywide birds eye views, the UKs second capital is able to identify prime areas for the regeneration so necessary for its continued growth.
The techniques used to produce modern aerial maps bear small relation to the old method of going up in a plane and taking a grainy photograph. These days, aerial photographs are taken using the most astonishingly high spec digital cameras and lenses in the business these new things are to the old tech what the Hubble Space telescope must have been to Galileos pair of glass lenses. Aerial mapping Manchester is being done with a whole new world of first rate technology: cameras and lenses capable of delivering perfectly sized shots suitable for every aspect of planning, legislation and record keeping. Indeed, so sophisticated are these cameras that a company like Get Mapping can deliver crisp aerial shots of a planning area at exact pre-determined ratios, allowing a construction company or surveyor access to the precise types of picture required by law for planning applications.
Surveying the city is made far easier by the application of LiDAR the Light Detection And Ranging technology that enables surveyors to see under the surface of Manchester to its actual topography. It doesnt see through buildings, mind, but when one is aerial mapping Manchester with a view to planning new developments, LiDAR is capable of taking out the tree lines and overgrowth that can drastically alter a planned view of a mooted area for construction. LiDAR mapping shows the actual ground surface, rather than plant cover which allows surveyors to get a proper idea of how the land lies and, therefore, whether or not it is suitable for construction.
Unsurprisingly, Manchester isnt the only city to be so strongly covered by all this new mapping technology. It is, though, one of the biggest and most vibrant and certainly one of the quickest changing. Planning aside, the aerial mapping Manchester project is going to assure one thing a proper record of how the city was, after all these changes have taken place.
