Remote Sensing Module 1 Challege Assignment

The link posted here is to a map created using ERDAS IMAGINE 2010 software as part of the University of West Florida On-line GIS Certification program class, Photo Interpretation and Remote Sensing (GIS4035/L). The link requires Internet Explorer to open and display properly.

The map is a remotely-sensed image of part of the city of Pensacola, Florida. As this is the first challenge in the class, the goal of the challenge was to create a map from the initial image that contains all the usual map elements using the ERDAS tools. I chose to highlight two target features that stood out on the image, Pensacola Naval Air Station and a feature in the northwest portion of the map with an unknown identity which I have highlighted using one of the ERDAS symbols for indicating "unknown".

Module 1 Challenge - Pensacola

I had a lot of trouble initially with the ERDAS software. As with Adobe Illustrator in last semesters class, the user-friendliness in the program was not immediately intuitive and it took a long time just to get a map image that looked reasonable to me to display as a final submission. There also seemed to be some refresh issues when I was placing the scale bar. Further, I could not figure out how to set the scale bar settings so that I could control the configuration to look like I wanted. The scale is set when the annotation is created and so you can't really re-size it after the fact so I just kept playing with the size until I found something reasonable. However, the software does not seem as amenable to making maps as GIS or AI so hopefully, at some point, we will be able to export to one of those applications for the final map production.