I highly recommend visiting the museum in Dayton if you're even a slight aviation nerd and happen to be in the region. Its worth the drive. Where else can you see a U2, a B2, an F22, an SR-71, and an F117 all the same hangar? Trick question, they have the only B2 on display!<p>They have a massive range of the history of aviation with a good mixture of foreign birds as well as US aircraft. I'm personally a fan of those classic Douglas planes, they're so incredibly iconic and have quite a showing at the museum.<p>EDIT: I guess I should clarify the relation to this article. The actual prototype is housed at the Air Force Museum in Dayton, OH along with the C-97 that carried it on display. They have a small exhibit with some example photos of its technology. Its literally right next to the B2 on display.
Precursor to the Gorgon Stare systems? [1]<p>I assume 70 years of tech has only resulted in surveillance that is cheaper, lighter, with longer loiter times, on a smaller plane, farther away, and a clearer, faster image.<p>And since politicians never listen to me, I feel helpless to vote it down.<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorgon_stare" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorgon_stare</a>
<i>drool</i><p>Post-WWII would have been a great time to be working in tech. "To photograph people's faces from high altitude, we'll need a lens with a 240 inch focal length." "But our airplanes are only 140 inches diameter". "We'll use mirrors."
From the article: "The first photo Arthur Lundahl and I saw from this project was of New York City. The aircraft was seventy-two miles away, and yet we could see people in Central Park."<p>This was a camera with lenses designed in 1947. Is the current tech state of the art available? My understanding is that the close up aerial imagery on Google Maps is patched together from much lower flying aerial photos. But these CIA cameras from the 40s sound superior to what we have on Google Maps today (seeing people in central park from 72 miles away, for example).
Cool, this camera was installed on the Convair B-36 [0] which is one of my favourite examples of a "transitional platform". It was a bomber with 6 propeller and 4 jet engines. These days we'd call it a hybrid. It's a great example of a product that came out at a time when the new tech (jets) wasn't quite ready but still provided some advantages. But then you have the disadvantages of maintaining both the old and the new systems at the same time. Can you imagine being a mechanic working on this plane? The same as an SRE working in the cloud and a datacentre, or a developer using a modern framework and maintaining a legacy codebase.<p>[0] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convair_B-36_Peacemaker" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convair_B-36_Peacemaker</a>
A similar interesting lens is the 5200 mm f/14 that Canon built in the 60s: <a href="https://petapixel.com/2010/01/06/ginormous-5200mm-canon-lens-on-ebay/" rel="nofollow">https://petapixel.com/2010/01/06/ginormous-5200mm-canon-lens...</a>
I wonder if this had a massive xenon flash system as well, like this mentioned for WW2..<p><a href="http://web.mit.edu/6.933/www/Fall2000/edgerton/EdgertonInWorldWar2.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://web.mit.edu/6.933/www/Fall2000/edgerton/EdgertonInWor...</a>
<p><pre><code> Maximum resolution: 28 lines/mm
Film size: 18-by-36-inch (46 cm × 91 cm)
</code></pre>
...for a final resolution of 12,880 x 25,480, or ~1.2 gigapixels. Not bad for 1951. Never underestimate film!