File talk:Wfm monument valley annotated.jpg

Name that butte

archived discussion from Wikipedia:Reference desk, moved here by Finlay McWalter

Say, is this a photo of Monument Valley, or somewhere else? It was taken on a flight from San Francisco, California to Houston, Texas, and I figure it is Arizona somewhere, but I've no idea where. -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 21:15, 6 Aug 2004 (UTC)

- Take a look at this Terraserver image (set the map size to "Large" if your monitor can handle it.) To my eye, it's a match, but I'm not extremely good at these things. If you switch to the topo map view, you'll see that you're looking at features which exist in Monument Valley (West and East Mitten Butte, Sentinel Mesa, etc). Catbar (Brian Rock) 13:51, 8 Aug 2004 (UTC)

- As I look again, I become more certain - this is looking at part of Monument Valley. Nice picture, by the way. Also, not all of Monument Valley is in Arizona, some is in Utah. To be more precise, it's all on Navaho Reservation land. Hope this helps. Catbar (Brian Rock) 14:42, 8 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Yes I agree. I was sceptical at first, but I can see it now. One confusing element is that the Terraserver image is a montage and the shadows fall in the opposite direction at the top of the large view.

You need to rotate the Terraserver image by a little over 90deg to the right, scale it down to about a half, and mentally project it, then it covers a patch about 100x100pix near the middle right of Finlay's image. You can match it if you can identify the line (heading NW on the Terraserver image) of the two shadowed spots near the centre (presumably the E+W Mittens) with the larger island toward the top. Those three points run ESE from the centre of Finlay's picture. Once you've found that you can match all sorts of peaks and valleys. Well done! -- Solipsist 18:48, 8 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Thanks. My first judgement was just an eyeballing and I wasn't sure either. Later, I started mentally walking around the object I now believe is Sentinel Mesa in both pictures, figuring out the directional shift needed to match the maps, and then found that everything matched, hence my second note.

The picture was taken in southeastern Utah, looking southwest into Arizona. The solitary fairly sizable butte in the center of the lower right quadrant of the picture is Sentinel Mesa, I think, which is just north of the Utah-Arizona border. Thanks again for a nice question and a nice picture Finlay! Catbar (Brian Rock) 19:30, 8 Aug 2004 (UTC)

...and the plane was at about 32,500 ft. Judging from the length of the shadows it was some time between 4:30pm and 6:15pm local time ;-)   -- Solipsist 20:25, 8 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Wow, thanks all for such unexpected dilligence. As to the time - the EXIF data in the file says 12:45 california time, so that's 13:45 mountain time, I think. I can't be sure the clock was correct (the camera was brand new) but other photos in the same set look to be timed correctly, or within an hour. The photo was taken on 11th July 2002, and perhaps my (rather excessive) photoshop contrast-enhance may make the shadows appear to be more profound. Thanks again. -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 20:55, 8 Aug 2004 (UTC)

I'm going to upload an annotated version. The current work-in-progress version is here. I'd appreciate any comments on it before I upload it. -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 19:54, 9 Aug 2004 (UTC)