"A lot of people look at trees and just see green, I see a kaleidoscope."

"A lot of people look at trees and just see green, I see a kaleidoscope."  

Nature.com has an article on Greg Asner's Carnegie Airborne Observatory (CAO). 

"The heart of the CAO's US$8.3-million sensing system — dubbed the Airborne Taxonomic Mapping System (AToMS) — is a spectroscopic imager designed by engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California. Capable of registering more than 400 frequencies of light, from ultraviolet to infrared, the instrument will take 60,000 measurements per second, with great accuracy."

Policies and politics apart: the images (mapping carbon storage and biodiversity) are absolutely brilliant in their own right: otherworldly diagrammatic landscapes created from data but with such richness and clarity that are 99% photo-realistic with iridescent trees bathing in purple'o'negative.