Schooner Nina - MERGED 3 THREADS

[Friend of Nina]

It's TomNod . Was Digital Globe...

[Mr B]

Wave Piccys for the Tasman, Today,

That 1992 Schooner that was lost, Was a Movie based on fact,

[Wotname]

Fingers crossed

[Friend of Nina]

I tried to find article about the Nina in Soundings Mag just older articles.

Cherie

[fitek]

Great work!

I found absolutely nothing but water in my search on tomnod

How old is this imagery?

One thought though: given how flat most of the imagery is-- shades of blue with very small spots of white-- even a really simple algorithm could scan through the imagery and tag all the spots greater than size X for later human followup. Not sure how to get programmatic access to the imagery though...

[hpeer]

Originally Posted by Friend of Nina

I tried to find article about the Nina in Soundings Mag just older articles.

Cherie

See below

[ternmarine]

Nina search extends to wider area - National - NZ Herald News

[ternmarine]

Nina search extends to wider area

By Teuila Fuatai Email Teuila

7:39 PM Tuesday Aug 20, 2013


Expand
The missing American schooner Nina.


A search for the missing yacht Nina will be extended tomorrow to a wider area of the Tasman Sea near Norfolk Island, after a second day of searching found nothing.
A Gisborne-based Kiwi Air plane yesterday began a new search for the 85-year-old American vessel after an orange object, believed to be the liferaft was spotted in a high-resolution satellite image.
Search liaison John Funnell tonight (Tue) confirmed a search of the ``higher probability area'' of 65 by 185 km, which had been identified by the Rescue Coordination Centre New Zealand, was completed today.
"Nothing of any interest was found,'' he said.
A wider search area had been outlined for tomorrow, but poor weather was expected to delay the morning start, Mr Funnell said.
The Nina left the Bay of Islands on May 29 and was headed for Newcastle, Australia. Neither the yacht nor the seven people on board have been seen or heard from since June 4. A search was launched on June 25 but was called off on July 4.
The yacht is owned by professional captain David Dyche III, 58, and his wife, Rosemary, 60.

They were on board with son David Dyche jnr, 17, and fellow Americans Evi Nemeth, 73, Kyle Jackson, 27, and 18-year-old Danielle Wright. Also on board was Briton Matthew Wootton, 35.
Family and friends of those on board have refused to give up hope, and have been fundraising to pay for private searches to continue.
Mr Funnell said a decision would be made about further searching at the close of play tomorrow.
"At this stage, they [the families] have enough funding for another day of searching.''
- APNZ

[foolishsailor]

Congratations on keeping the pressure on till you got a result.

There will be many questions, methinks, in the Inquiry that follows.

[bazzer]

I too have seen the orange blob on Tomnod. But is it real or a pixel artifact from the file conversion ? Did it show up on a subsequent pass of the satellite ? There are a lot of artifacts on the tomrod images, it's difficult to know if to mark them or not. But the orange blob sure looks like a life raft to me and its about the right size. Why can't the USA send a drone or a U2 to photo the area? Sending a single Cessna out is like finding a very small needle in a very large haystack

[hpeer]

Many, many years ago I was in USCG aviation. Yes, visual inspection is very difficult for any number of reasons. A Cesna would presumably have no more than two sets of eyes, with no relief, and lots of other duties. Infinitely better than nothing though.

I would imagine getting up a drone or U2 to be impossible.

Maybe the best would be an aircraft with some decent thermal imaging. Perhaps a USCG C-130 out of Hawaii?

[bazzer]

Originally Posted by hpeer

Many, many years ago I was in USCG aviation. Yes, visual inspection is very difficult for any number of reasons. A Cesna would presumably have no more than two sets of eyes, with no relief, and lots of other duties. Infinitely better than nothing though.

I would imagine getting up a drone or U2 to be impossible.

Maybe the best would be an aircraft with some decent thermal imaging. Perhaps a USCG C-130 out of Hawaii?

I'm guessing, but I bet even the NZ government has some kind of photo recon. Surely Tomnod needs to give the area where the orange blob was seen to them and get on with it ASAP

[fitek]

Do we know the lat/long of the orange blob?

Certainly another set of images from either recently before or after Aug4 would be needed to confirm the blob wasn't an artifact. The blob ought to be somewhere in the general vicinity. But I spent several hours looking through imagery and saw nothing bigger than a couple pixels, so it sure seems like it ought to be *something*.

Regarding the lat/long, I was trying to compare the area vs Google Maps. Google Maps has a static image API-- I can pull down a PNG file with a script and then run ImageMagick to do edge detection and then flag any tiles that aren't only open water. Seems like a much faster way to search! And only a few hours of coding.

Don't think the same is possible with Tomnod, though it might be possible to automate via the UI.

[nova13]

bazzer, fitek .. see my post above yours just out of moderation ... a clearer image we could not wish for ! Tomnod has posted new pages to try to establish where it might have moved to ... I have alerted newsmedia in NZ overnight to this image and begged them to publish it to exert pressure to get Orions in the air from both sides of the Tasman and urgently.

[nova13]

Oh bad mistake by me ... a new paragraph has just appeared with the two photos explaining it is in fact but a comparison with a coastguard photo showing the great similarities with the orange object on satellite image. I am so, so sorry for any distress this might have caused family and friends ...