SEABOSS Images from U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) Cruise 2010-015-FA in JPEG Format

The mid-sized SEABOSS was designed and built at the USGS Woods Hole Science Center. This system is equipped with two video cameras, a still camera, and a van Veen grab sampler. This system, weighing approximately 185 lbs, can be used to depths up to 40 meters. The multi-conductor electrical cable is manually deployed. The system also has a 50 Watt/second flash unit powered by 8 AA batteries. Two battery-powered lasers are set 15 cm apart for scale measurements. The red laser dots can usually be seen in the video depending on the bottom type and the distance to the sea floor. A third battery powered laser is positioned at an angle so that when it intersects the other lasers, the mid-sized SEABOSS is at the optimum height off the bottom for a still photograph. The camera is set to a manual focus and set to a default focus distance once the camera is powered up. The default focus distance is slightly less than the optimum height above the seafloor to account for optical distortion under water.

The USGS mid-sized SEABOSS system was deployed to capture still photos and bottom video offshore in eastern Long Island Sound. This system was used to obtain video and 1 to 4 images at each station as the OSV Bold drifted over the seabed for 2 to 5 minutes. The video was collected with a Kongsberg Simrad model OE1365 video camera. The third laser on the system was set to an angle such that the optimum photograph height was 50 cm. The default focus on the camera was set to 50 cm. The imaged area is most often within .3 to 1 meter from left to right. Other camera settings are as follows: aperture is set at f/8; shutter speed is 1/250 second. A total of 64 acceptable still photographs of the sea floor, which were recorded on 35-mm film, were acquired at 20 stations within the study area with a Photosea 1000 stills camera. Although the images themselves have no georeferencing information, the navigation related to each photograph is available in an Esri formatted shapefile: h12012_botphotos.shp. This data can be downloaded from the following locations: https://pubs.usgs.gov/of/2013/1060/data/botphotos/h12012_botphotos.zip; https://pubs.usgs.gov/of/2013/1060/html/catalog.html

Back ashore, the rolls of 35-mm film taken on the cruise within the study area were commercially developed and scanned to produce the digital images.

The full-resolution JPEG images (3615x2451 pixels) were downsampled using Photoshop CS2 to create JPEG images with 600 x 407 pixels. The filenames indicate the resolution. For instance, the full-resolution JPEG image - 012-1a_fr.jpg - was downsampled to produce mid-resolution JPEG image 012-1a_mr.jpg.

Edits to the metadata were made to fix any errors that MP v 2.9.36 flagged. This is necessary to enable the metadata to be successfully harvested for various data catalogs. In some cases, this meant adding text "Information unavailable" or "Information unavailable from original metadata" for those required fields that were left blank. Other minor edits were probably performed (title, publisher, publication place, etc.). Attempted to modify http to https where appropriate. Updated the field activity link. Moved the minimal source information provided to make it the first process step. The metadata date (but not the metadata creator) was edited to reflect the date of these changes. The metadata available from a harvester may supersede metadata bundled within a download file. Compare the metadata dates to determine which metadata file is most recent.

Added keywords section with USGS persistent identifier as theme keyword.