Remote Sensing, The Science

There are many, and often sophisticated, ways of defining remote sensing (such as characterizing it as the detection of electromagnetic radiation from a distance), but I find it useful to think of remote sensing in terms of something we’re all familiar with—taking photographs. When we take a photo of an object with our cellphone or a digital camera, the light reflecting from the object enters the camera through the lens to a photosensor, and the sensor detects the amount of light coming from the object, records the value, and this value is reconstructed on our computers or phones to produce the photograph we see on our screen.1

  1. The principle for old analog cameras is the same, only the photosensor, instead of being digital, is a photographic film which undergoes a different amount of chemical reaction based on the amount and type of light it receives. This chemically altered film can then be reconstructed into a photograph. ↩