Bingo!

Uncross your fingers (mine are still sore from last night), but it actually worked. Now I won´t really feel 100% until I have the photos in hand and correctly georeferenced within the GIS database, but I am now light years ahead of where i was yesterday at this time....absolutely unbelievable!

So I went back to the archives this morning and spent 3 hours with my new good friend Lt. Nuçez. At first he was doubtful we would be able to find the area of interest. The reason being that the scale of the indice, which is in the photo below, is 1:180,000. For those of you not too familiar with these sorts of things...that means it´s really hard to make things out on the ground. However, armed with my laptop, I was able to pinpoint the latitude/longitude of the site by placing a grid ontop of my area of interest. Before I devolve into computer geek/photogrammetry babble, let´s just say that with some basic math I was able to determine which photos comprise the area I am interested in....BINGO.



Now, unforunately, it wasn´t quite so easy as determining the photos I was interested in and pulling them from the catalog. These photos were taken in 1966 and only exist large format negative form. So what I had to do was place an order for the photos I wanted. It was very lucky that I set up two weeks for this part of the trip, because it will take them one week to develop the photos....and I leave next weekend for the Northeast (of Brazil mind you). This was not a cheap endeavor, getting 28 photos (4 flight lines at 7 photos per line) printed from negatives (this is an 8X11 reprint that overlaps correctly for photogrammetric usage/stereoscopic viewing ((geek speak decoding: think 3D Avatar, with the overlap of the photos enabling me to view the photos and conduct analyses in 3D...on photos from 1966!). But it was not too too expensive, relatively, in comparison with say the GeoEye imagery I was awarded by ASPRS, and regardless, these data are actually priceless and will be a cornerstone of my dissertation!

So, I´d like to thank all of the various people who helped me find this place, as well as those who told me it didn´t exist. Now that I know photos exist of 1966, the question is, are there other needles in this haystack i.e. maybe photos from the 70s, 80s, or 90s?

...and let´s just say that a preliminary examination of these photos via the index is pretty clear, this was not necessarily a virigin rainforest in the mid-1960s.