Satellite Imagery

Brenningmeyer's explanation, adapted from Brenningmeyer and McNally
forthcoming in Living for Eternity, Monasticism in Egypt, ed. Philip Sellew

Back to site map or White Monastery or forward to Building D in excavation.

Todd Brenningmeyer has examined both the Red and the White monasteries and the surrounding area using a variety of technologies including recently declassified satellite imagery from the first generation of U.S. photo-reconnaissance satellites code named CORONA, multi-spectral images from the Landsat 7 satellite, and high resolution panchromatic and multi-spectral data from the QUICKBIRD satellite platform. These have pinpointed numerous anomalies to be investigated on site or possibly excavated.

QUICKBIRD imagery is the most recent generation of high resolution commercial data products offering a resolution of 70 cm. in the panchromatic bands and a little over a meter in the near infrared. The opportunities for archaeological prospection have been greatly enhanced in recent years through the growing availability of satellite data with multi-spectral and radar capabilities. Unlike traditional aerial photography, which is limited to the narrow bands of the visible spectrum, multi-spectral imagery measures the reflectance of features outside the range of visible light. This characteristic allows a more thorough examination of areas of interest, where subsurface architectural remains cannot be easily identified by the human eye but can be measured by sampling the reflectance patterns of features across a range of bandwidths including both visible and infrared light.


While Quickbird’s multi spectral capabilities are not as enhanced as those of the Landsat system, the extremely high spatial resolution has proven to be extremely beneficial for identifying and interpreting structural and possible subsurface remains captured in the satellite scene. The dataset used in this study was acquired in the fall of 2002 and represents our most recent view of the site. This system has also proven to be very valuable for this preliminary phase of study and the rest of this discussion will focus on the methods and results of our analysis of this dataset.


In the winter of 2002, work began on the initial processing and enhancement of the Quickbird scene. Given the different benefits of examining the site using the panchromatic and multispectral bands, which offer high spatial resolution on the one hand and enhanced spectral resolution on the other, a decision was made to combine the two data types using current pan sharpening techniques. The resulting data preserved the 70 cm. resolution of the parent panchromatic scene but also offered the additional benefits of the infrared bands. The illustration shown above and the illustration on the first Red Monastery page, show details from the pansharpened scene.