Example of using Sitrec to locate a video

[Trailblazer]

The more I use Sitrec the more impressed I am.

Another useful aspect is that if you know the rough area a video showing aircraft was taken from, you can use Sitrec to narrow down pretty closely the exact spot that it was taken from. This is easier if there are multiple aircraft but you can also use background stars if the video is at night and decent quality.

Here is an example: labelled on Reddit as "southwest Washington state" but the poster's history suggested it was Vancouver WA. The initial labelling of date and time were also incorrect, the correct details were 5.47pm on Jan 24th.



Dropping the flightpaths of nearby aircraft into Sitrec and playing with the camera location, it was fairly straightforward to get a good match.

Sirec link: https://www.metabunk.org/u/y4rDye.html

That gave likely co-ordinates of 45.620N, 122.489W.

Street View didn't show a match right on the pin, but that construction site just to the east had some photos – and the building design appears to match that shown in the Reddit video.

So it seems that the Sitrec "best guess" was within about a quarter of a mile of the true location.

 

[Trailblazer]

I used a slightly lower-tech version of this approach to locate this one (eventually) using the path of the plane in front of the stars.



Rather than Sitrec, I used Google Earth, moving the viewpoint until the flightpath matched the background stars, and then dropping a pin in several places, then drawing a line between them. The logic was that the location should be on that line.

That highlighted one shortfall - the mismatch between different methods of altitude reporting: barometric vs GPS. In this case the two altitudes were sufficiently different to give a location some distance out on the ground.

The actual location was here:

Here you can see the FR24 track (green) vs the ADSBExchange track (red). In this case the ADSBExchange track was the one that matched the video almost exactly.

In the Washington state example in the previous post I think it was the altitude of the helicopter (the closest aircraft, N917KF) that gave the slightly faulty location. Putting the camera in the correct spot, the helicopter appears slightly too high in the 3D view.