Before the snow melts and the Spring colours arrive, we wanted to show you a last glimpse of Winter. Brrrrrr..

Many years ago, our colleague Bruno Caprile found an interesting collection of old drawings of panoramic views. These drawings look a lot like the synthetic mountain profiles generated by the Marmota technology, so Bruno decided to share with us his precious collection.

You can see a sample of Bruno’s maps in today’s post: a portion of a wide panoramic view from Monte Leco (1072m), not far away from Genova, Italy. We generated the same view with Marmota; you can download our modern rendering here (4660×706, 122K).

The main difference is that Isola d’Elba and Isola Capraia should be visible, at least theoretically. It would be nice to obtain a real photo taken from Monte Leco and compare it with our synthetic results.

Thank you Bruno for sharing this view from the past!

The fastest and easiest way to travel to World is through the experiences of others and the photos they share with us all. But, if you are unfamiliar with a place, how do you know what you are looking at? This is where ‘Marmota’ can help you.

I came across this great image taken in Hawaii yesterday and it had the comments “Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa from Haleakala”, but which was which and how far away were they? 2 minutes later I had my answer, see for yourselves…..

Thanks for sharing this image with us Jerry

Nepal is a stunning and remote part of the World where many peak remane un-named and un-touched by human hand. In this image only one peak has a name and it’s not easy to ensure that this is correct. Thanks for sharing this with us Laurent Bois-Mariage.

Today’s photo has been shared by our friend Aleksandar Gospić. It’s a lovely warming shot of the sea and the colourful houses in the village of Vinjerac in Croatia. Thanks for sharing this with us Aleksander

After a lovely winter’s walk on ‘ciaspole‘, our colleague Gloria Zen reached the top of Dosso di Costalta (1955m) (also featured in Thurday’s post), where she took this picturesque shot.

In the past, we featured other photos from Gloria on this blog: they are available here.

I’ve passed through Glenetive many times on my Scottish Highland trips, but I’ve never seen the mountains look as dramatic as this (it’s usually raining heavily and full of ravenous midges!). Thanks for sharing this photo with us Arthur.

Closer to home today. This image was taken by supermariano81 not far away from FBK on Costalta and shows us how lovely it is to be on the tops in Winter. Thanks supermariano81

Back to the Alps. This time JendaX has shared with us an amazing view of the Alps from the Czech Republic. Thanks JandaX

I thought that it was about time we tested Mamota in the US, so I browsed around Panoramio and found this great image from Larry Workman QIN taken on Nevada Highway 305. Unfortunately, there are only a couple of labelled peaks in the image. Thanks for sharing it with us Larry

You have to be pretty fortunate to see Lake Garda from a distance, as the mist rolls in from the Po valley ‘Pianura Padana’ all too often. Unfortunately, it wasn’t my lucky day

Back to the snow again, as it is still Winter after all…….

I think we all need a break from the snow! Here’s an image I took a few Springs ago, just to remind us that the green will return. Enjoy…..

This Winter has been a bit grotty and we’ve not seen our lovely mountains much. On Saturday, thankfully, the weather was good and so I headed up to the Monte Bondone range, above Trento, with the snow shoes and camera and took some lovely shots. Enjoy……..

Happy New Year!

The first post of 2010 is full of festive colour and was taken by our friend Aleksandar Gospić. It’s another amazing shot of Italy from the other side of the Adriatic. Thanks for sharing this with us Aleksander

It was August, 2008. Our friend Kumitey sent us some photos (published here) and presented Marmota to his colleague Fabrizio Lorenzini. Fabrizio is a photographer that likes to experiment with panoramic 360 degrees pictures but, at the time, our system was not able to deal with this kind of images. We recently added the support for panoramic photos in spherical projection, so Fabrizio submitted this 360 degrees photo taken from near the top of Monte Cadria (2254m).

The number of visible features is overwhelming and the correct way to visualize them depends heavily on resolution and physical size of the final media (computer screen? small print? huge panoramic print?). So instead of choosing a particular target resolution and rendering all the labels on it, we just sent Fabrizio this txt file containing the full list of labels (image coordinates are relative to size 8699×1024). Fabrizio took the file, imported it with a script into Photoshop, and then he manually fixed the labels. We publish here the result of his efforts: a 20591×2424 labeled panorama (7.2M). Congratulations Fabrizio! And thank you for your contribution.

Update (Dec 9th, 2009): Fabrizio printed his labeled panoramic picture in poster format (160cm wide) and sent us a seft portrait.

I quite liked one of the images from the panorama sequence published the other day, so I thought that it might be worth a seperate post.

Enjoy….

Another lovely image from our friend Aleksandar Gospić. Thanks

Dear Marmota Blog readers.

Today we are giving away a free super hi-resolution Marmota enriched poster (19000 x 3000 pixels). The photo was taken by Paul Chippendale on the 25th Nov 2009 in the grounds of Fondazione Bruno Kessler (where the Marmota project was born). Feel free to download it from here. Beware it is over 20MB ! The poster is released under CC-by-nc-sa3.0 license.

Enjoy …….

Matteo Finamore, the author of this photo, found one of our previous posts, concerning ‘mountains visible from far away’. He decided to sent us this photo featuring a flat region with far away ‘unknown’ mountains, asking us to name them. Today, we are publishing the results generated by our Marmota system.

The Monte Baldo group is perfectly visible, with its main peaks Cima Valdritta (2218m) and Punta Telegrafo (2200), about 170km away. Also Cima Presanella (3558m) is visible 226km away, although barely.

Just a reminder, don’t forget that we also share our EagleEye photo collection exploration tool with you all. It features all of our Blog images and a lot more, in an interactive browsing environment. You can find it here: http://tev.fbk.eu/marmota/eagleeye/

Have fun

Another shot from the top of Monte Stivo. I took it just a few days before the snow arrived. Next time, the snow shoes

How would you like to tend your flocks here, up at Malga Campo in the Italian Alps? Unfortunately, the access road in Winter is usually under a few meters of snow

Another lovely photo from Aleksandar Gospić. This time he’s not looking across the sea to Italy, but instead east towards Croatia. Thanks again, Aleksandar.

This morning was very cloudy, but for a few sweet minutes, just before breakfast, the Brenta was bathed in a warm Autumn glow. Enjoy…

I took today’s photo half way up the track from Malga Campo to Monte Stivo. The mist over Rovereto that morning was stunning and just the peaks above 1500m were visible. The spiky ridge in the center is the Gruppo del Carega

The third photo of Aleksander Gospić’s sequence. Just like the first photo, but with a much larger field of view.

The second photo of Aleksandar Gospić’s sequence. It was taken from the same place, on the same day, looking a bit to the right of the first photo. This time the main feature is Monte Catria (1701m), 247km away.

A photo from Loreto (Italy) we published a long time ago (July, 2008) features approximately the same peaks, and their shape is amazingly similar, even if the point of view is very different.

Last week we received this email from Aleksandar Gospić, the author of some of the best photos we have published.

In his email to us, he said: “This winter blast brought us some excellent visibility in last few day, so on Tuesday I went on Velebit expecting to see Italy and it was magnificent.”

We begin today by publishing the first of Aleksander’s magnificent photos. More will follow.

The visible details on these 260km away mountains are incredible!

Today’s picture was taken by our colleague Oswald Lanz from nearby Kasseler Hütte / Rifugio Roma alle Vedrette di Ries (2276m), looking approximately South-East towards Collalto (3436m). He used the camera integrated into his iPhone.

Thank you Oswald.

This nice photo covers a region of Italy we have never featured before on this blog: Basilicata.

It was taken from the village of Acerenza (833m), looking approximately North-West (291-314 degrees) towards Monte Vulture (1326m), an extinct volcano that is the main geological feature of the area.

Monte Crispiniano (1104m), 70km away, is not really visible in this photo, but we think that it should be possible to spot it in a perfectly clear day, or maybe just after sunset.

Today’s photo was submitted by Giuseppe Lipori, while the authors are the students of ‘Collegio del Mondo Unito dell’Adriatico‘.

Do you remember the photo from Passo Principe we published some weeks ago (here)? The point of view is not exactly the same, but this postcard from the past (1955) covers approximately the same mountain, Cima Catinaccio (2918m). You can also see the old Capanna Passo del Principe, now transformed into a rifugio.

This postcard comes from the Catina collection and the original is stored at the Biblioteca Comunale di Trento. All Catina images published on our blog are available here.

Today’s photo was taken from the village of Gaeta looking out over the bay to Formia.

Yesterday we came across a lovely source of old postcards, some of which have been geo-tagged. The archiving project Catina was undertaken by the library in Trento (Biblioteca Comunale di Trento) and is an interesting repository of vintage photos of our region. This particular image shows the village of Cavedine (featured in many of our blog posts and EagleEye entries). If you would like to see this photo ‘placed’ in 3D inside GoogleEarth then just download this Saluto.kmz file and open it with GoogleEarth.

Following on the sunset theme…. I thought that I’d share one of my recent photos from the other side of Italy. This time Lazio.

This nice photograph of Venice lagoon at sunset with far away mountains was taken by our colleague Claudio Cestari. Thank you Claudio!

The bell tower in the middle of the image is probably the fourteenth century Church of Santa Caterina, on the Mazzorbo island.

It is interesting to note that Cima Palon (2232m), 102km away and Col Santo (2112m), 106km away, are visible in another photo we published months ago, taken far away from Venice, from a village just North of Trento.

You can’t help but feel a little bit nervous looking down Via Vesuvio in Pompeii. One day Vesuvius will blow again, but let’s hope that the inhabitants have a bit more notice (or perhaps common-sense) this time.

Another photo from our colleague Gloria Zen (other pictures here). This time from Rifugio Passo Principe (2601m) looking towards Cima d’Asta (2847m), 33km away.

Mid pleasures and palaces though we may roam; be it ever so humble, there’s no place like home [song]

Rick Pappas, one of the best local photographer, shares some of his great pictures on his flickr photostream. In the past, we already asked him the permission to label some of his images and publish them on this blog (see here).

Yesterday we found this nice image of Adige valley, featuring a strange ‘oriental looking’ house. As Rick said in the comments, ‘that is so cool’, because I (Michele) live there, that is my home.

Thank you Rick for sharing this photo!

Another picture from our colleague Gloria Zen. This time it is an array of pointy peaks spotted from Rifugio Antermoia (2497m), looking SE (from 136 to 152 degrees). The main mountain is Cima della Vezzana (3192m), the highest point of the Pale di San Martino Group.

Other Gloria’s photos are available here.

We received today’s photo from our friends at SentieriVivi, a local company that is developing a mobile gps-based system for hikers. All photos from SentieriVivi (this one and future ones) are reachable following the ’sentierivivi’ tag. All SentieriVivi pictures  are copyrighted.

Last Sunday we planned a nice walk from Val di Bondone to Val d’Arnò, passing on the top of Monte Corona (2508m). Unfortunately, heavy rain hit us, so we looked for cover at malga Stabol Fresco (2078m), where we decided to abandon the climb.

This picture was taken just few minutes after the last drop of rain, when we were ready to go back to our car. Luckily, on the way down, we collected huge amounts of bilberries (Vaccinium myrtillus).

Philipp Weigell contacted us yesterday submitting this nice photo taken from near the top of Heimgarten (1790m), Germany.

The view is so rich of mountains that, at blog resolution, there is not enough space for drawing all the labels. For this reason, we provide also a full resolution version (4288×2848 1.7M).

This image is released under a CC-by license; thank you Philipp for sharing it!

I took this photo a few years ago from Via Ferrata Brentari above Val d’Ambiez. As there are too many peaks to label in this photo, I asked Marmota to draw only the visible buildings, such as farms and refuges. Unfortunately, you can’t quite see Rifugio Agostini,where we stayed the night, as it is just hiding behind the rocks to the right of the image.

This photo was taken from the start of a lovely walk that eventually takes you to Rifugio Val di Fumo. Although busy on a Sunday, it was easy to escape the procession of hungry walkers and find some really tranquil places. Enjoy…

How would you fancy relaxing on this bench for a while? Well, the next time you are passing by Val di Sole turn towards Pejo and then wander up the valley to Rifugio Cevedale – Larcher; it will be there waiting for you as you catch you breath. Enjoy the summer …..

Whilst visiting relatives in the far North of Scotland I took this dramatic photo of Loch Eriboll from Portnancon. Pretty typical weather for that area; very windy with blustery showers! Great local names

I saw this photo on Flickr from our friend Samuele Striatto and was impressed that he had managed to label peaks manually. Then upon closer inspection I saw that there were 2 vague mountain ranges in the distance. The perfect question to ask Marmota! As you can see (below) they are Monte Rosa and Dom which are both over 230km away. I can imagine that on a perfect day the views from Monte Baldo are stunning. Thanks for sharing this image with us Samuele.

Rifugio Rosalba is perched on cliffs below the summit of Grignetta in Lombardia. Today’s photo was taken by Justin Clements, and for a change I have shown it visualised in GoogleEarth, as the effect is particularly pleasing. You can see the same GoogleEarth screenshot with the photo made transparent below.

Alex Tate from British Antarctic Survey research center sent us this photo (taken by his colleague Dr Teal Riley) asking us to label it. It features an incredibly remote range of mountains and, apparently, all of the visible peaks are unnamed. So, we decided to manually add some custom labels with latitude/longitude pairs instead of real names. Thanks Alex and thanks Teal for sharing this amazing picture.

Since this region is outside the CGIAR-CSI SRTM coverage, we tested the recently released ASTER Global DEM (a product of METI and NASA). The result is quite good, but not perfect; the triangular rock in the middle of the image is, in fact, completely missing in the DEM, and some very pointy peaks are modeled with a smooth shape. We publish below a synthetic rendering with color proportional to altitude.

Update July 27, 2009: Alex Tate noted that the triangular rock that is missing in the DEM is probably the only named peak present in the photo. It should be, in fact, Mount Ahab (925m). We hope to re-render this scene in the future when a more precise terrain model will be available.

Synthetic rendering with color proportional to altitude

Rifugio Pedrotti is a classic mountain hut placed at the start of the Bocchette Centrali (one of my favourite via ferrata). From this point of view the ferrata disappears behind Cima Brenta Alta.

Sometimes when you are out walking you wonder “What’s the name of that peak over there?”. Well, whilst out walking on the ‘Cargador del Veder’ footpath the other day I wondered what that triangular mountain was called just behind the new wood carving. When I got home I asked Marmota to tell me. Apparently, as you can see, it is ‘Castello dei Camosci’, or ‘Castle of the Chamois‘ in English. What a great name!

It’s about time that we featured a photo of the ‘classic’ three peaks (tre cime) that tower over our heads in FBK. To enjoy this beautiful horseshoe walk, you would normally park in the Viote car park, head up to Monte Cornetto first and then traverse the ridges to Doss d’Abramo and Cime Verde, and then head down through the forest to Viote once more. Take at look at the view looking back from Cima Verde here

Today’s image was taken by our colleague Gloria Zen during a travel to Armenia few years ago. It is a spectacular view of Mount Ararat (5165m, 31km away) from Khor Virap monastery (Armenia).

I was walking on a footpath just below Fai della Paganella when this clear view of the Eastern part of Dolomiti di Brenta appeared. The tall building on the right is Hotel Miravalle.

Today’s image comes for an interest viewer, Denis De Mesmaeker, who asked us to label one of his images. It was taken close to Bellinzona in the Canton of Ticino, and gives us a lovely view of Monte Rosa in the distance Thanks for sharing it with us Denis

Today’s image was taken by Rick Pappas, an exceptional local photographer and a regular contributer to our Blog. I’ve visited Molveno several times but never have I managed to capture it like this. Great photo Rick. Thanks for sharing it with us.

I came across this amazing image of Chile on Flickr by Ole Begemann called ‘Pucón and Lago Caburgua’ and couldn’t resist asking Marmota to label it for us. To my surprise there are actually 4 volcanoes visible, and one of them lies on the Argentinian border 183km away! Ole wrote in his comments: “The peak in the background could be Llaima (3,125 m) but I’m not sure.”; he got it spot-on Thanks for sharing this image with us Ole

We just can’t stop playing with the results of the Marmota alignment process!

Registering an image with the world and the DEM data allows us to view the photo from a new perspective through the creation of a virtual camera.
In today’s photo we changed only the elevation of the original point of view but pointing roughly in the same direction.
The original hi resolution image is here (6212×2832 12Mb).

As we can see from a single shot we don’t have all the information we would need to fill the entire image so the grey pixels show you the altitude in different shades of gray.

You can find a nice video of the virtual camera moving around here (or here ).

The views weren’t bad from my early morning dog walk yesterday….

People keep asking us ‘Where did you get the idea of Marmota from?’. The answer is here…..

From our office window, we can see a couple of peaks poking through a gap in the mountains (only on a good day). We asked around and nobody could tell us what they were called. We consulted maps and Google Earth, but could not find the answer. From this curiosity, Michele and myself came up with the Marmota concept; rendering the World around us and then matching the real and artificial World using computer vision algorithms.

Once this alignment was achieved, all pixels in our photos had a latitude, longitude and altitude. Thus we finally had the tools to answer our question !!

Alas, the mystery was solved and our mountainous office view became less special

Only joking

The yellow GPS track you can see in the photo was the footpath taken by Michele last weekend to get the shot seen in a previous post and today’s image was taken from my office window just after lunch

A possible way to visualize the output of our Marmota system, is through GoogleEarth’s PhotoOverlays. From the extracted alignment parameters, it is immediate to produce the necessary kml code to embed the considered photo in the Earth’s landscape.

This screenshot presents a semi-transparent labelled photo, aligned with the syntethic world of Google Earth. You can play with it yourself: just load this kmz file into your local installation of GoogleEarth.

The author of the photo is Paul Chippendale and the white and blue building is FBK-Irst, the place where we work.

The stimulus for writing about PhotoOverlay visualization comes from today’s post of the Google Earth Blog. After describing some features of our system, they say: “I would like to see this kind of technology to automatically match Panoramio photos to where they were taken so you can view them in PhotoOverlays in GE.”.

You can find other examples of Marmota generated PhotoOverlays in our gallery, or you can download any of the following kmz files: Allalinhorn (author Luca Cristoforetti), Sunset (author Paul Chippendale),  Malghetto (author Diego Zanin), FBK (author Paul Chippendale), Adige (author Michele Zanin).

Until just a few weeks ago, we used only a single ‘peak names’ source: geonames.org. It is a global collection of toponyms created and updated by the community in a wiki style. Each toponym in geonames is a point, characterized by its geographical position and class. This is ideal for labelling peaks, but it is very limiting when dealing with spatial features, like rivers, lakes, roads, boundaries, etc.

To overcome this limitation, we decided to explore the more advanced data coming from OpenStreetMap. OpenStreetMap is “a free editable map of the whole world” that can be seen as a huge collection of geographical elements. There are three types of elements: nodes, ways, and relations. Nodes are just geospacial points, like geonames’s toponyms. A way is an ordered interconnection of nodes that describe a linear feature such as a street, or similar. A relation can group other elements together, nodes, ways, and even other relations. Instead of the static node classification of geonames, in OpenStreetMap each element is associated with a number of key-value pairs (tags) describing the element.

Today’s picture was taken by Michele Zanin from a panoramic viewpoint near to the village of Fai della Paganella, looking South towards Trento, Italy. The peak names come from geonames, while rivers and the motorway are from OpenStreetMap. This is just a first example of an OpenStreetMap overlay; we plan to explore more deeply this kind of data visualization in the near future.

During the first Italian OpenStreetMap Conference (5-6 June 2009) OSMit, we met Steve Coast, the guy that started the OpenStreetMap project in 2004. He wrote a post on his blog about us, using today’s image as an example.

Whilst on holiday in Scotland this April, I took this lovely photo of one of the most distinctive mountains in Scotland, Suilven, near Lochinver. Enjoy….

This is the last in the series of images taken from Monte Gazza. I loaded the GPS track of the new Garda-Brenta walk into Marmota; the visible parts have been automatically drawn in red. The trails visits: Riva – Rocchetta – Rif.Pernici – Stenico – Rif. Cacciatore – Pt. Balandino – S.Giovanni al Monte – Ps.Ballino – Riva. More details of the trail and the GPS track can be found here

I couldn’t resist placing another image from the same Monte Gazza walk (see yesterday’s here). This time we are looking towards the South (towards Monte Stivo).

Spring has arrived and the Alpine meadows are full of life again. I took this photo from Monte Gazza (Magpie Mountain), just above Margone.

I never go anywhere without my camera and GPS. So even when I visited the Alpen Zoo in Innsbruck with my family I couldn’t resist taking a new photo for the Marmota Blog

Today’s image is from Aleksandar Gospić. His amazing photo of Monte Vettore (2476m) from Croatia can be seen as clear as day 245km away. In his Flickr comments he says that “It was as clear as if there’s no atmosphere”. Thanks for sharing this great photo Aleksandar

We already published some views across the Adriatic Sea from Croatia/Bosnia towards Italy. Today you can appreciate the opposite point of view: from Monte Luro, Italy towards the Velebit massif in Croatia, about 200km away.

This picture was originally published on Panoramio and the author is denny74.

Three weeks ago I was driving near to Onich, in the middle of the Scottish Highlands. My plan was to drive another 100km before looking for a B&B, but the amazing scenery of Onich made me stop there for the entire afternoon and the night.I had time for a walk and I choose a random footpath in the direction of a nearby hill. I took this picture half way up the hill, looking back towards Loch Linnhe.

Although this photo from John Samson is a little hazy, I couldn’t help placing it on the blog as a reminder of the views I used to enjoy when I lived in the sunny UK.

Thanks for giving us the permission to use the photo John.

Today’s long distance photo was taken by John Samson and shows an amazing view from Mount Whitney (4421m). On his Flickr post he says that “On a VERY clear day you can see 306 km from Whitney to San Bernardino Forest”.

The same image was analyzed and discussed by Jonathan de Ferranti here. Jonathan, in his ‘longest line of sight’ page, says: “As far as I know the longest ground to ground line of sight that has ever been photographed in the US lower 48 is to San Gorgonio Mountain, 190 miles or 306 kilometers from Mount Whitney, California.”

Thanks for letting us share this labelled image John.

Please, if any of you have similar long distance shots that you’d like to share then just send us an email.

This interesting photo was taken by Franca Aicardi from Savudrija, Croatia, looking approximately North across the Gulf of Trieste.

The most prominent peak is Triglav (2864m), 100km away, the highest peak in Slovenia and the preeminent Slovene national symbol.

Just above the interface between the sea and the land, you can observe a mirage caused by air layers at different temperatures.

We’re investigating new ways to visualize our aligned images and we thought that the old red/blue glasses might be interesting. I took this photo over the weekend from Viote of the Brenta with the intention of converting it to 3D. Dig out your old pair of 3D specs and scroll down to try it for yourselves

3d image of the Brenta

and here’s the 2D original of the same portion of image…..

2d version

Nestled in the foothills of the Canadian Rockies, west of Calgary and east of Canmore and Banff, the Municipal district of Bighorn No. 8 includes the five hamlets of Benchlands, Dead Man’s Flats, Exshaw, Harvie Heights and Lac Des Arcs. This photo of the Rockies was taken from here by Maureen Flynn-Burhoe; here you see her own labeled image.
This photo was also published on Flickr under a CC licence. We redistribute this derived work under the same license.

Today we feature an image from Chris Dessaigne which shows us a lovely view of the Canigou mountain (Pyrénées – France) from the top of the high Cathar castle of Quéribus.

It is published on Flickr under a CC licence. We redistribute this derived work under the same license.

Do you remember our previous post about Cornetti and Paloni? Today we publish another image containing multiple ‘Monte Cornetto’s and ‘Palon’s, but from a completely different perspective: this time it’s from a ski slope on the Apennines about 200km away! The two ‘Cornetto’s also appear to be very close from this perspective, but in reality they are more than 40km apart.

The author of this long distance shot is Luca Nanni. A synthetic rendering of this scene (to better appreciate the altimetric features hidden by the long distance) is available here (800×676 59K).

Taken from Cima Bocche (2745m), looking in a southwesterly direction, covering 243.1 to 248.6 degrees.

The author, Piergiorgio Svaizer, is a colleague of ours at FBK. We aim to publish other photos taken by him in the near future.

This amazing nightly view from Milan received a lot of attention during the last few days. First of all, it was featured on one of the most important Italian newspapers (Corriere della sera, Feb, 13th 2009). Then it was discussed on the Italian blogosphere (examples here and here).

The author is a very skilled photographer that loves mountains and mountain photography: Davide Necchi. Please visit his website, you will find other beautiful examples of his art. In the future we will label other Davide’s photos.

The author of today photo is Luca Nanni, a long time friend.  He sent us this picture taken from Zocca, a small village near to the border between Modena and Bologna, Italy. We are more than happy to make our Marmota system label the visible peaks.

This photo is part of a panoramic sequence: we will publish some of the other shots in the near future.

This is the fourth image of the Monte Fasce series. Source (Italian Wikipedia), author (GrazianoU), and CC license are just the same.

This is the third image of the Monte Fasce series. Source (Italian Wikipedia), author (GrazianoU), and CC license are just the same.

This is the second image of the Monte Fasce series. Source (Italian Wikipedia), author (GrazianoU), and CC license are just the same.

A tiny bit of Monte Viso (3841m), 157km away, is visible behind closer mountains. It is not the first time we feature Monte Viso (aka Monviso), click here to see all previous posts.

Following the advice of one of our readers (Bruno), we begin today a short series of views taken from Monte Fasce (832m), near to Genova, Italy. The source of these pictures is the Wikipedia page dedicated to Monte Fasce http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monte_Fasce, the author is GrazianoU, and all of them are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.

The first picture of the series was taken looking approximately East toward Monte Aiona (1695m), Monte Nero (1675m), and Monte Ramaceto (1345m) and includes a nice full Moon. This time, the apparent diameter is realistic and, considering the timestamp embedded into the EXIF metadata, the position in the sky appears to be correct.

Moon details: given the mountain alignment, the measured position of the Moon is about 83.7 degrees (Az) and 7.2 degrees (Alt). The embedded timestamp is March, 13th 2006 18:52:41 (unknown timezone). The measured position is compatible with the expected position of the Moon at 17:51 CET on the same day.

Suppose you were in Vatican City, trying to visit Saint Peter’s Basilica and you were stuck in a three hour queue. What can you do, apart from admiring the beautiful square designed by Gian Lorenzo Bernini? Peak spotting, obviously!

Today’s picture was taken by Michele Zanin close to the Basilica’s entrance, looking East, just left of the magnificent Egyptian obelisk. You can spot Guadagnolo (1218m), 39km away, the highest village of the Latium region, where there is the ‘Monumento al Redentore’. The perfect alignment of St. Peter’s Dome, the top of the obelisk, and the Guadagnolo monument is well documented here (in Italian): ‘Degno di nota è il fatto che il gigantesco complesso del monumento, o per caso o per preciso intento, si innalzava esattamente in asse con la piazza S. Pietro a Roma, sicchè l’obelisco, visto dalla cupola, collimava esattamente con il Redentore di Guadagnolo, che, a sua volta, volgeva lo sguardo verso Roma.‘

It is Christmas time, so we think it is appropriate to publish this very snowy picture by cpt.spock (available on flickr under a CC license).

This Winter has been a very snowy one already in Trentino. Over 4m reported on the tops in just a few weeks! This photo was taken by Paul Chippendale and shows us that even the snowiest days can have a silver lining. You can find the original image here. As usual, Paul’s images are published on Flickr under a CC licence and we redistribute such derived works under the same license.

Today we feature an image from Alex Cevenini which shows us a lovely contrast between the warmth of the beaches by Nice and the cold of the snow covered Alps.

It is published on Flickr under a CC licence. We redistribute this derived work under the same license.

Today we must thank Wojciech Doganowski for his amazing shot of Mont Blanc! It is published on Flickr under a CC licence. We redistribute this derived work under the same license.

Today’s gorgeous photo comes from Raphael Ullmann and features the village church in Bettmeralp VS, Switzerland.

It is published on Flickr under a CC licence. We redistribute this derived work under the same license.

Just for fun I thought that I’d label the mountains behind Palermo in Carlo Columba’s photo of the amazing conjunction last week of the Moon, Jupiter and Venus. Wow!! Just a shame it was cloudy in Trento that day You can find the original photo here. It is published on Flickr under a CC licence. We redistribute this derived work under the same license.

Warning: the apparent diameter of the Moon in this photo is 5.6 degrees instead of the more realistic 0.5 (more information here and here). It is therefore evident that this picture is the aesthetically pleasant result of the composition of multiple photos, without any pretense of being astonomically realistic.

Today’s image was taken by joe0301b. It’s another one of those really rare glimpses of the Alps from over 200km. The original photo can be found here. It is published on Flickr under a CC licence. We redistribute this derived work under the same license.

Today we see a different view of the Alps taken by Dieter Orens. Although it’s not the record distance view of the Alps it is still 184km! and their clarity in this photo is stunning. Great photo Dieter, thanks for sharing it

Another amazing picture from Samuele Striatto! This time an incredibly clear view of Monte Viso (3841m) from Pian di Bobbio (1735m), almost 240km away.

You can find other Monte Viso labeled photos here.

Today’s amazing photo of Corsica from Genova was taken by Stefano Genova. Such an amazing view across the sea (over 245km) is a pretty rare event as you can imagine. It is published on Flickr under a CC licence. We redistribute this derived work under the same license.

When Samuele Striatto sent us this picture taken near to the top of Pizzo dei Tre Signori (2553m), we immediately tried to guess the distance of the mountains. We had the impression of the closest one being about 5km away, with the others being about 80km away. We were wrong!

We fed the image to our Marmota system and we discovered that the right distances are about 40km for the closest ones  (Pizzo della Croce (1491m) at 37km and Monte Generoso (1701m) at 40km) and 182km for the farthest one (La Grivola 3969m). Samuele used a huge 300mm objective, giving the illusion of being much closer… amazing.

We also prepared an high resolution version of this photo here (3008×2000, 819k jpg), and a synthetic rendering here (3008×2000, 256k png) (with color proportional to distance).

Today’s photo comes to us from Danilo Neri. He has beautifully captured the moonlight on Grignetta from Grignone in Lombardy. The original photo can be found here

A night view from Cassino (Latium), Italy. The author is Janesdead and the photo is published on flickr under a CC licence. We redistribute this derived work under the same license.

This photo was taken by Francesca Bovolo and portrays our friend Lino, who asked us to label it. The location is quite symbolic for our Marmota blog, because Lino was just a few meters away from the shore of Lago Marmotta (2704m). This tiny lake is near to Rifugio Larcher (2608m) and just below the highest point of the Trentino province, Monte Cevedale (3769m).

NOTE: Marmotta is the Italian word for Alpine Marmot, while ‘Marmota marmota’ is the scientific name (Latin).