Example graphic illustrating the process I've settled into for synthetic aperture radar visualization. From left to right the columns show 1) SAR images of a number of carriers, 1) scaled template fitting, and 3) rendered visualization with foreground/background color and shadow / island effect.

Revisiting an image from March showing the Turkish amphibious drone carrier Anadolu with its carrier group, heading home early from NATO exercises after the onset of the US-Iran conflict. Mostly put this together because I realized I'd compiled the info cards for the escorts and I liked this scene.

French aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle near Djibouti and the Bab-El-Mandeb strait in yesterday's imagery, alongside two escorts. Identity of the escorts is a bit underdetermined but one is almost certainly an Aquitaine class frigate

Large exercise in today's images centered on the amphibious carrier Juan Carlos I and other Spanish navy ships, as well as the Danish frigate Iver Huitfeld and (nearby, cut for space) the Turkish frigate Orucreis, the Canadian Frigate St. John's and the Dutch Auxiliary Den Helder.

USS Carl Vinson also visible in the descending pass later in the day, alongside the USS Makin Island further north in the same radar stripe.

FS Charles de Gaulle also in radar imagery from the 25th in the same region by Djibouti and the Bab-el-Mandeb strait. Haven't yet spotted the British/German minesweeping group operating with them. Some dimensional matches to the Lyme Bay but hard to differentiate from commercial shipping traffic.

USS Carl Vinson west of the Baja in today's radar images.

French aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle with an escort in the Gulf of Aden in yesterday's images.

USS Dwight D. Eisenhower off the coast of Florida. Visible in both Sentinel-2 color imaging and Sentinel-1 synthetic aperture radar imaging.

China State Shipbuilding Corporation's civilian drone research carrier Discovery-1 A unique ship that is unfortunately rather indistinct from above and almost always in busy waterways, so I have a hard time following it. Spotted recently by @covertshores.bsky.social

HMS Prince of Wales with the rest of the UK Carrier Group. As usual ROI fits on smaller ships are "best guess" unless there are distinctive features like the superstructure on the Tide class here. Guess here is the bright end of the Type 45 is the helipad / spot by the other end is the radar mast.

Two destroyer escorts are visible near the carrier in today's images of the Sea of Oman

French aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle in the Gulf of Aden in yesterday's images.

Nimitz class carrier further west than typically spotted in the Sea of Oman. Once again almost certainly the Lincoln but can't definitively say it isn't the the Bush.

USS Theodore Roosevelt and USS Essex in Pearl Harbor for the RIMPAC exercises in today's radar images. Added code to let me offset the ship's island in the overlay mask just a few pixels, since it's often blown out over the ship footprint. Think it complements the shadow effect.

Chinese aircraft carrier Fujian at the base near Sanya on Hainan Island in today's images, having transited the Taiwan strait. Incidentally I think this is just a gorgeous scene. I like the contrast of the ocean inside versus outside of the breakwaters.

The same view of the aircraft carrier Liaoning in today's Sentinel-2 images, confirming that the ship on the next pier over is indeed the amphibious drone carrier Sichuan

Chinese aircraft carrier Liaoning back at the pier in Qingdao following its deployment to the Western Pacific.

USS George Washington near Guam on the 13th. They've been around in the days since but I haven't spotted them on the imaging satellite passes. Discovered an inconsistent bug in my template scaling factor code that explained why every other fit just felt slightly off. It's dead-on now.

Joint exercise with amphibious carriers from France (Dixmude), Spain (Juan Carlos I), and the US (Kearsarge) off the coast of North Carolina. Landing craft can be seen emerging from the Dixmude.

Chinese aircraft carrier Fujian heading south through the Taiwan Strait. I had noticed its absence from the pier in Qingdao on the 21st and had a hunch this is where it was going. [The big bright rectangle in the radar image is probably the Type 076 amphibious drone carrier but not 100% on it]

HMS Prince of Wales in today's imagery of the Norwegian Sea. May look for the other ships in the task group later but they weren't in tight formation some hours earlier in today's radar images.

Amphibious carrier USS Tripoli in what seems to be it's usual spot in the Northern Arabian Sea with another amphibious ship and an escort.

USS Boxer and USS Portland in the Andaman Sea near the inlet to the strait of Malacca, following their recent departure from Singapore.

USS Essex arrives at Pearl Harbor ahead of RIMPAC

Nimitz class carrier and escorts in the Arabian Sea in yesterday's images. I missed it in the clouds but it did not escape the notice of twitter/x user HN0222 It's further south than other recent sightings so I think this might be the USS George H.W. Bush. Can't be sure of course.

We did indeed get a nice view of the festivities today! Annotation not comprehensive but I have all the resident and visiting carriers in the one and the accompanying ships for the two international flattops (FS Dixmude and ESPS Juan Carlos I) in the other.

Clear view of USS Eisenhower and USS Kearsarge in today's images. Looks like a clear day so hopefully we'll get the 2A satellite extended stripe and can see the large international contingent gathered for the event in Norfolk.

UK Carrier group again visible in the next pass. The nature of polar orbits means that high latitudes have more frequent coverage. This, combined with the distinctive features of the Queen Elizabeth carriers making them easy to spot, accounts for their showing up on my feed so much...

USS Nimitz at Naval Station Mayport. I realized I didn't have to reinvent the entire discipline of remote sensing and that very talented scientists have already developed continuously-updating automated scene segmentation maps on the very website where I get all my pictures xD

US Amphibious ships in today's stripe: the amphibious carrier Tripoli in its usual spot as well as a Lewis B. Puller-class helicopter sea base. A San Antonio class amphibious ship and an auxiliary are also present in the formation. My guess for the sea base is the USS John L. Canley.

Also visible operating in the same area in images from the 17th. Think the green spot is the radar mast on the Type 45. Right now combining VV and VH (averaging or multiplying) before colorizing but may consider multicolor compositing again if I can figure out a scheme that looks good consistently.

HMS Prince of Wales with the rest of the British carrier group in the Norwegian Sea in today's radar imagery. Not confident I have HMS Duncan facing the right direction but gave my best guess (think the major reflectance is the radar mast) since the imagery of the other two ships is so clean.

Shifting the burned-edge off the mask a few pixels bit creates a shadow effect that I think is a good compromise that highlights the artificiality of the region of interest while still preserving a sense of continuity between it and the background.

USS Dwight D. Eisenhower in yesterday's radar images.

Still mulling compositing for images near terrain but going to try the next couple radar sightings with this as the foregound. Burning a hard edge at the boundaries of the ship mask but keeping the dynamic range matched with the ocean part so one can still appreciate the details in the raw imagery.

Amphibious carrier USS Kearsarge training with another amphibious ship off the North Carolina coast. Was hoping to also catch and annotate the large international contingent in Norfolk for the event this weekend but the clouds wouldn't cooperate.

Further visualization experiments with custom region-of-interest masks for each ship. Dilating the mask makes the ROI boundaries look more natural with the 10m resolution of the satellite images. Next will see about the background compositing... [Image is the USS Ford at Norfolk on the 16th]

I couldn't set down trying to isolate the ship from the background in these radar images, but I realized I had already developed a workflow to get ship vector graphics to the correct image-coordinate scale for the overlays so I put two and two together....

Chinese carrier Fujian back at the Yuchi base today after training in the Bohai sea.

USS Theodore Roosevelt in the usual carrier spot west of Baja Mexico after leaving San Diego yesterday. The convex hull masking method does a decent job of outlining the ship but the edges are just never going to feel very natural. Might try something else next time (watershed thresholding?)

Alternative composition of HMS Prince of Wales in this morning's radar images. The convex hull mask actually worked really well except for the concavity by the ski-jump. Needed to hang this one up though so I cheated and hand-curated the mask a bit😛. Will experiment more in a future image...

HMS Prince of Wales off the coast near RAF Lossiemouth. Great detail on this one and I did successfully experiment with using a convex hull to outline the ship for background separation. But having trouble figuring out how to transition the gradients neatly so went with my old SAR mapping for now.

USS Tripoli off the coast of Oman in today's images. Another amphibious ship from its group is about 70km northwest of it.

USS Boxer in the South China Sea, receiving an underway resupply in the busy sea lane between Singapore and Vietnam. The amphibious ship USS Portland is seen following behind.

USS Nimitz off the coast of Florida, heading north to Norfolk Used binary thresholding in the VV channel to make a mask and separate the ship from the background in the VH channel (which typically has all the detail). Think it turned out well.

Indian Navy aircraft carriers Vikramaditya and Vikrant still at pier at the Karwar Base. Hard to say if they've sortied the past couple weeks as there've consistently been clouds over the base. Radar image false color compositing is getting there. I think I've settled on the water gradient.

HMS Prince of Wales in the Moray Firth in today's radar images, while its escort HMS Duncan is in port at Dundee. More experimentation with color mapping and compositing on this one. Not the greatest source material though since there's a big artifact in the VH Channel in front of the ship.

French amphibious helicopter carrier Dixmude off Virginia Beach in today's images.

Italian aircraft carrier Cavour back in the Gulf of Taranto after its brief visit to Palermo