Remote sensing is where you collect information about an object without making physical contact with that object. In the context of geospatial analysis, that object is usually the Earth. Remote sensing also includes processing the collected information. The potential of geographic information systems is limited only by the available geographic data. The cost of land surveying, even using a modern GPS to populate a GIS, has always been resource-intensive.
The advent of remote sensing not only dramatically reduced the cost of geospatial analysis but took the field in entirely new directions. In addition to powerful reference data for GIS systems, remote sensing has made the automated and semi-automated generation of GIS data possible by extracting features from images and geographic data. The eccentric French photographer, Gaspard-Félix Tournachon, also known...