Afghanistan Region Images

These images are presented as thumbnail sketches of areas in, or adjacent to, Afghanistan. As digital images, they can be imported into standard software packages and enlarged; however, as thumbnail sketches they are always of inferior quality to the original imagery and/or database. The ASTER images listed herein were selected (quality, cloud cover, etc.) and acquired by Doug Peters and Lindsey Maness, who have extensive experience with images of this type: these represent only a very small sample of the available imagery.

Viewers should directly contact the original source to get copies of the original digital data. Detailed instructions for how to do that will soon be incorporated into this document. In the interim, if someone urgently needs a copy, please contact Lindsey V. Maness, Jr. directly via E–Mail at LVManess@gmail.com for instructions. I am not an authorized reseller of this imagery, but can put you in touch with the appropriate authorized party to acquire it, and can offer expert advice on effective use of the imagery for a variety of purposes. For those involved in the anti–terrorism effort (US or Allied), there will be no charge assessed for routine assistance (i.e., that which does not require a significant expenditure of time or money). For all others, my charge is $200/hour, plus expenses, payable in advance.

For more information about ASTER images, contact: http://imsweb.aster.ersdac.or.jp/ims/cgi-bin/dprSearchMapByMenu.pl .

ASTER Thumbnail Sketch Images are always of dimension: 224 Pixels Wide by 208 Pixels High.

The scene IDs for ASTER images are actually the numbers following the letters. The letters are our way of indicating the country(s) of coverage, with afg = Afghanistan; irn = Iran; pak = Pakistan; etc. The scene ids for ASTER images are actually the numbers following the letters. The letters are our way of indicating the country(s) of coverage, with afg=Afghanistan; irn=Iran; pak=Pakistan; etc. Other than being an easily–understood system, this scheme also enables the viewing of these documents on computer operating systems that do not recognize file names beginning with a number. For example, for image "afg2003360700.jpg," the image is predominantly in Afghanistan, has a scene id of 2003360700, and is of type *.jpg. The information following (on other lines) provides more information about location (to the East and South-Southeast of Sistan Lake), etc., the latitude and longitude of the scene center and the date and time (GMT) of acquisition. To derive local (Kabul) time, add four and one–half hours to GMT (06:57:38 GMT = 11:27:38 Kabul): since Afghanistan has never used "daylight savings time," this is a very straightforward calculation.

As a final note, it would have been more useful to have listed these ASTER images in satellite path–and–row order (rather than roughly, by country), as was done with the original Landsat series of satellites, but no such scheme has been implemented to date for ASTER. Lacking an accepted path–and–row scheme, the images were sorted first alphabetically by country acronym(s) and second numerically by scene id.