I graduated from the Royal Military College of Canada (http://www.rmc.ca/) in May 93' with a B.Sc. (Space Science). My under-grad project dealt with tracking deep-space objects (asteroids) using a retired military telescope. Alas, due to construction problems, the telescope was not operational in time and the project turned into a proof of concept using a much smaller mead telescope. Most course work dealt with orbital mechanics, image processing (using C++), astrophysics, space policy, and several other courses I can't remember right now.
I am presently working on ScanSAR beam edge detection, also known as satellite roll angle determination, in order to provided a more robust algorithm for calibration of ScanSAR images. Current algorithms work well on homogenous scenes (the Amazon) but fail to provide adequate calibration on more diverse scenes with large water bodies, cities, etc.. The current idea is to monitor the beam overlap areas in order to determine their relative position, and possibly their absolute position, with an overall aim of reducing calibration errors to less than 0.5 dB (or lower) across the scene.
I love playing hockey, but whether or not I am very good is a choice I'll leave up to anybody that watches one of my games - same goes for skiing. Being from Saskatchewan (http://www.gov.sk.ca/), or better yet (http://www.clubsask.com/), I inherently love the cold and small towns - hence I find no snow in Vancouver to be a very strange event. Yes, we do have hills for skiing in Saskatchewan, of course Vancouverites would only call them speed-bumps.
RRSG / UBC / dannob@telus.net / Updated April 1, 2001