LUECKE?
OK, this writing is ridiculously big, I mean, look how zoomed out we are! Thats some dedication there.
Thanks DDA.
Google Sightseeing takes you on tour of the world as seen from satellite, using the free Google Earth program, or Google Maps in your web browser. Each weekday your guides James and Alex present new weird and wonderful sights as suggested by readers.
77 Responses to 'LUECKE?' 
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This weblog is really a very nice idea!
Did you know: “Luecke”, (or “Lücke”) is actually a meaningful german word which stands for “gap”, “loophole”, “empty space”, “void”.
how much planning had to go into that? That’s crazy!
Hmm.. I wonder what pt. size that is?
There’s an explanation at http://earth.jsc.nasa.gov/newsletter/SpatialRes/default5.htm
I saw this from the airplane window as I was flying into Austin for SXSW. Nobody else I talked to remembered seeing it or could tell me exactly what it was, though one Austinite thought that might be the name of a man who owned a large amount of property in that area.
Wow, this reminds me of the Preacher cartoons… “The world’s single largest piece of profanity” sort of thing.
Same image, but from a plane window:
http://homepage.mac.com/grungy/.Pictures/TexasTrip03/LUECKE%3F.jpg
Wow, I think this is the record so far…
I calculated it out: The font size is 1,468,800 points. In theory it would by a bit bigger if the font had descenders…
For the curious, the Keyhole app says that the entire word is about 2.5 miles long. Each letter is ~0.56 miles tall and ~0.3 miles wide.
From http://earth.jsc.nasa.gov/newsletter/SpatialRes/default5.htm:
We also made an empirical estimate of spatial resolution for lower contrast vegetation boundaries. By clearing forest so that a pattern would be visible to landing aircraft, a landowner outside Austin, Texas (see also aerial photo in Lisheron 2000), created a target that is also useful for evaluating spatial resolution of astronaut photographs. The forest was selectively cleared in order to spell the landowner’s name ‘LUECKE’ with the remaining trees (figure 10). According to local surveyors who planned the clearing, the plan was to create letters that were 3100 ´ 1700 ft (944.9 ´ 518.2 m). Photographed at a high altitude relative to most Shuttle missions (543 km) with a 250-mm lens, Formula 3 predicts that each pixel would represent an area 28.6 ´ 36.0 m on the ground (table 5). When original film was digitised at 2400 ppi (10.6 mm/pixel), letters correspond to 29.4 ´ 18.8 pixels for a comparable pixel size of 27 – 32 m.
I actually know a Dave Luecke! I wonder if there is Dave Staples Luecke
not the same size, but here’s coronado written in the sand at san diego:
Placemark: Google Maps / Google Earth
piep piep kleiner Satellit…
Seit Google in 2004 den Anbieter Keyhole übernommen hat, ist nun schon fast ein halbes Jahr vergangen. Es hat sich einiges getan in den Google-Labors, so kann man bei Google Maps mittlerweile zwischen normaler Ansicht und Satelliten-Ansicht wählen. D…
Απο ψηλά είναι όλα μια… ζωγÏ?αφιά
Την νÎα υπηÏ?εσία του Google, Maps μάλλον την ξÎÏ?ετε.
Αν και δυστυχώς δεν καλÏ?πτει την Ελλάδα, παÏ?όλα αυτά υπάÏ?χουν μÎÏ?η
So has anyone looked around area 51? They’ve probably had that sattelitte image fuzzed up….
.::Szőkelizer 147::.
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Placemark: Area 51 / Google Earth
Sightsee the World At Home
Google has recently launched a new service, Google Maps, enabling users to view high-resolution satelite pictures at ease.
Look at how close-up it can get!
(That is The Gateway Arch, St. Louis, Missouri)
Someone has thought up an interesting ap…
I’m surprised no one has commented on the face pattern just below the last E. Seems a bit coincidental of a tree formation…
My ecological moment here: did this guy really have to demolish so much of the forest in order to do this?? Why couldn’t he have the letters be spelled out by cleared areas, rather than the other way around?!
My ecological moment here: did this guy really have to demolish so much of the forest in order to do this?? Why couldn’t he have the letters be spelled out by cleared areas, rather than the other way around?!
silly selfish hippies, earth doesnt care if trees are growing on it….
I don’t think a combo of Mesquite and Cedar can be called a “Forest”. They are more of a Texas weed, besides, they just take up good grazing pasture (land) for cattle (cows).
There’s actually quite a few pines in Smithville/Bastrop.
The land is very close to Buescher State Park. This is a mostly decidious forested area. Conifers are mostly limited to Bastrop State Park, some 20 miles north of the area.
You cannot see it from the ground but all pilots using Smithville Airport, seen in the above referenced photo, know of this landmark.
ik wil gratis veel popetjes
There was a write-up about the Luecke land in the Austin paper a few years ago. The needed to clear-cut an area for grazing land, but you always need to keep a certain percentage of the tree growth to maintain healthy wildlife habitats, erosion control, etc. They had the idea to leave the un-cleared areas in a pattern that spelled out their name.
Living in Austin, I rarely actually get to see it because the only flights that pass over it are to and from Houston, and are usually too low when crossing over Bastrop. But one time I had one of those crazy connections that sent me to Houston before going BACK over Austin to the west coast. We crossed Austin at about 35,000 feet, and you couldn’t miss it then.
A comment for “Spugnology:”
Cattle can’t graze the crummy vegetation (precious little) that grows under pine trees that are found in that area (part of the “Lost Pines” that includes Bastrop and Buescher State Parks, plus a lot more land). The majority of the land HAD to be cleared, the smaller percentage was left forested SPECIFICALLY for reasons of good land-management.
This “arboreal sign” was mentioned on NPR’s “All Things Considered” yesterday. I rushed to Google Sightseeing to make sure it was mentioned here as well, and of course, it is.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4696643
Leah….that was me who sent the e-mail that NPR read on the air. I’d known about the LUECKE lettering from Googlesightseeing and even referenced this site in my e-mail (which they didn’t mention on-air).
That is my uncle’s property,and he did it just for the hell of it.
It’s just north of Smithville off of hwy 71, 30 miles ESE of Austin.
Thanks Pete. By the way, did you uncle also do the face just below the final E on purpose?
JS Says:
April 10th, 2005 at 5:41 pm
Area 51
Maybe Nellis AFB??
I’m an Air Traffic Controller at Houston Center. I work the airspace between Austin and Houston. Just about every day we have a pilot ask about the LUECKE on the ground. It is very visible to pilots going into Austin from the east.
Here’s a photo taken by one of the STS-95 astronauts.
http://eol.jsc.nasa.gov/scripts/sseop/photo.pl?mission=STS095&roll=716&frame=46&QueryResultsFile=112418130460082.tsv
The rectangle is pretty obvious in the upper right of the low-res images, but the letters are unmistakably LUEKE in the huge 4030×4030 image.