LUECKE?
Friday, 8th April 2005 by Alex Turnbull
OK, this writing is ridiculously big, I mean, look how zoomed out we are! That's some dedication there.
Thanks DDA.
About the author
Alex has decided that his title will be Senior Vice President of Stuff.
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: View Placemark
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…
So has anyone looked around area 51? They’ve probably had that sattelitte image fuzzed up….
Area 51
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.
I am also a Luecke but not a Texas resident. I’d like to find out if we are related. Any suggestions? Thanks!
the letters are about 3000′ tall X 1600′ wide each using the Google Earth measurement tool
this really annoys me as i get to see it each time i fly to seattle. this region also known as “lost pines” is the furthest western stand of the eastern loblolly pine and it is isolated, which makes it unique. it is NOT contained to only TWO imaginary smallish state parks and it is NOT mesquite and cedar. if clear cutting was necessary for cattle grazing (weird) and some habitat was being conserved for ecological purposes then this is the biggest ass in the face example i’ve seen for those concerns. the liberals in austin should have at least figured that out. “oh ok… really, habitat conservation, big letters…yes well thats genious we’ll print that.” the region was clear cut around mid 20th century and it grew back, probably at the expense of a few species. as for those “texas weeds” whatever that means, there’s alot of good grazing terrain (land) here in the houston area for bovines (cows) taken up by urbans ever sprawling (build-pave-abandon) waste. maybe we could carve that out…..it could say COWS.
That is quite a site to see!!!!!!
umm.. really.. that’s just a guy in austin texas.. he’s a mathematician.. just search his name in google..
That plot of land is adjacent to Rocky Hill Ranch. Rocky Hill is a great mountain biking destiniation in Texas. It has longhorn cattle and excellent mountain bike trails (about 30 miles of singletrack). They host mountain bike races and duathlons including the famous “24 hours of Rocky Hill”. You can camp there year round and visit the “saloon” where they serve beer and hamburgers and host live music on weekends. The property that says “Lueke” frequently has parachuters dropping in on weekends. And motorized hang gliders too.
hey man , thats my name! cool beans!
it was made by giant half man half animal beasts who ate there name into the terrain…………..
Well, half of you are right. This land is my land (yes, really). As my nephew Pete already pointed out, I did it for the hell of it. I was going to open a golf course, but decided not to. If you look in the “L”, you can see 4 holes of my private “course”, though I haven’t maintained it in a couple of years now (due to some surgerys preventing my game), so you might not be able to make it out. My son showed me on the Google Earth program, and you could indeed see the bunkers and barely make out the fairways. Nifty program there, and good eye to all of you folk! Cheers!
This Texas sized tree carving lies directly lies directly under “Pufer” intersection. “Pufer” is an electronic fix used by all aviation but primarily airlines flying the high altitude routes west bound out of Houston. “Luecke” is right about the point where we reach cruising altitude and make our “enroute” public address. Personally, I like to point “Luecke” out. It’s almost always on the left side of the jet.
Terry the Pilot
From a fellow Luecke in New York, this is great! My family here is getting a kick out of this. At first, I thought it was a hoax being played by a co-worker. One by-product is it appears to be bringing the Lueckes of the world out of the woodwork…
I noticed LUECKE when I flew from Atlanta to San Antonio. Of course I then had to search to web to find out more about it. If you look at Local Live, you can see it when zoomed out. When you zoom in, LUECKE is gone, an older image. It does show a good before pic.
my mom and jimmy are too cool.
i saw this big word when i was flying home from Houston, TX. At first i just saw the L and the started to read the rest of the word and then wrote it down on a napkin. i thought it was just the name of some guy that owned a lot of land and then let my imagination ran away. i started to think of something else like an alian note but its all in my head and im sicking with the first idea!
After they cut down the trees they feasted on baby seal and ate condor sandwiches.
I think it’s very interesting. I’ve been trying to find this for a while.
The man who had it done is a very rich man from Giddings, Texas. He had it done because he could, what better reason would you have? This info came from a reliable sorce…I believe her anyway!!