#geolocation
16 writeups ·all writeups
132 kV and a Puddle: Geolocating a 360° Image in Iceland
One power line voltage put me within 10 m of the answer in minutes. The rest of the day went on the assumption that "the 360 image" meant Google's.
The Survey Plane Already Flew — Timestamping with Open Aerial Archives
National aerial survey programmes photograph entire countries on a fixed cadence and publish the frames as open data — in Denmark's case with capture timestamps accurate to the second. When and how to use Skråfoto, PDOK, and Norge i bilder to date a scene instead of guessing.
Angle of Ascent — Dating a Takeoff Photo to the Second
An aerial shot of a KLM Cityhopper lifting off an unnamed runway. Runway markings give the scale, the scale gives the airport, and Denmark's open aerial imagery archive gives a timestamp accurate to the second — enough to name the exact flight and its arrival gate.
House Hunting — Athena Trace 2026 Writeup
A screened gazebo, no landmarks, no signage, no readable text. The whole challenge is knowing that the object is the index — and that the listing is the authority on spelling.
Massacar — Athena Trace 2026 Writeup
The research chain resolved quickly. Nearly two hundred attempts went into a different problem: guessing which object the setter had anchored the coordinate to.
Nuclear — Athena Trace 2026 Writeup
A misfiled photo of a Japanese motorcycle club, a UI footer that lies about the country, and a POI pin that has to be trilaterated because the plus code isn't precise enough.
One Photograph — Athena Trace 2026 Writeup
A caption that names the landmark instead of the venue, a statue that vanished into an overexposed sky, and a flag that wanted the newspapers' spelling rather than the historically correct one.
Op Sindoor — Athena Trace 2026 Writeup
A single interior photograph, nine candidate sites, and a naming convention that decides whether a correct identification still scores.
Not here any more — A Payload No Scanner Can See
zsteg, Aletheia and five statistical detectors all called this file clean. The ZIP was sitting at offset 0 the whole time — hidden by splitting one bitstream across three different bitplanes.
packet.bspak — Three Channels, Two Decoys, One Stereogram
Breaking a layered OSINT packet: binary-ASCII JSON, a QR code that isn't a QR code, and a Vocaroo spectrogram that hands you a Google Maps pin.
Finding a 205-Metre Tower From Two Shadows
GEOINT with no image at all. A survey notebook, two shadow measurements, one timestamp — and enough solar geometry to pin one building in the Kalahari.
Finding a Norwegian Farmhouse Brewery From One Photo
Hacktoria GEOINT. No EXIF, no signs, no text. Here's how I got from an unmarked Scandinavian valley down to a single building — and the shortcut I ignored for six hours.
Nine Kilometres Off: Geolocating an Airstrike Photo in Mogok Township
A news photo captioned 'western Mogok' sent me searching the wrong town for an hour. The phrase is administrative, not geographic — and the fix came from a Google Maps review.
Corrupted — Finding a Town Behind Black Squares
A GEOINT writeup: geolocating a censored Street View panorama in the Italian Alps using nothing but a poem's four constraints. Why the redactions were the biggest hint in the challenge.
Hacktoria — Wild Fire
A GEOINT writeup: locating a Colorado wildfire from an evacuation-zone map, and why the InciWeb URL will hand you the wrong incident number. With the WFIGS query that settles it.
Snow, Catenary, and a Confident Wrong Turn: Geolocating a Train Window
A single blurry photo shot from a moving train. The deduction chain landed on the right country in the first thirty seconds — and then I talked myself out of it for three hours. A GEOINT writeup about tool-induced hallucination in data-sparse regions.