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The catastrophic 8.0 Richter magnitude earthquake that occurred on 12 May 2008 in Wenchuan, China caused extensive damage to vegetation due to widespread landslides and debris flows. In the past five years, the Chinese government has implemented a series of measures to restore the vegetation in the severely afflicted area. How is the vegetation recovering? It is necessary and important to evaluate the vegetation recovery effect in earthquake-stricken areas. Based on MODIS NDVI data from 2005 to 2013, the vegetation damage area was extracted by the quantified threshold detection method. The vegetation recovery rate after five years following the earthquake was evaluated with respect to counties, altitude, fault zones, earthquake intensity, soil texture and vegetation types, and assessed over time. We have proposed a new method to obtain the threshold with vegetation damage quantitatively, and have concluded that: (1) The threshold with vegetation damage was 13.47%, and 62.09% of the field points were located in the extracted damaged area; (2) The total vegetation damage area was 475,688 ha, which accounts for 14.34% of the study area and was primarily distributed in the central fault zone, the southwest mountainous areas and along rivers in the Midwest region of the study area; (3) Vegetation recovery in the damaged area was better in the northeast regions of the study area, and in the western portion of the Wenchuan-Maoxian fracture; vegetation recovery was better with increasing altitude; there is no obvious relationship between clay content in the topsoil and vegetation recovery; (4) Meadows recovered best and the worst recovery was in mixed coniferous broad-leaved forest; (5) 81,338 ha of vegetation in the damage area is currently undergoing degradation and the main vegetation types in the degradation area are coniferous forest (31.39%) and scrub (34.17%); (6) From 2009 to 2013, 41% has been restored to the level before the earthquake, 9% has not returned but 50% will continue to recover. The Chinese government usually requires five years as a period for post-disaster reconstruction. This paper could be regarded as a guidance for Chinese government departments, whereby additional investment is encouraged for vegetation recovery.

We present a study of the three-dimensional structure of the molecular clouds in the Galactic Centre (GC) using CO emission and OH absorption lines. Two CO isotopologue lines, 12CO(J = 1 → 0) and 13CO(J = 1 → 0), and four OH ground-state transitions, surveyed by the Southern Parkes Large-Area Survey in Hydroxyl, contribute to this study. We develop a novel method to calculate the OH column density, excitation temperature and optical depth precisely using all four OH lines, and we employ it to derive a three-dimensional model for the distribution of molecular clouds in the GC for six slices in Galactic latitude. The angular resolution of the data is 15.5 arcmin, which at the distance of the GC (8.34 kpc) is equivalent to 38 pc. We find that the total mass of OH in the GC is in the range of 2400–5100 M⊚. The face-on view at a Galactic latitude of b = 0° displays a bar-like structure with an inclination angle of 67.5±2.1° with respect to the line of sight. No ring-like structure in the GC is evident in our data, likely due to the low-spatial resolution of the CO and OH maps. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Geosynchronous satellite with big inclination is not completely stationary relative to the ground. Its sub-satellite point moves periodically in the north-south direction with ground track of shape like "8". The larger the inclination angle is, the larger the range of motion is. Such effect makes the effective exposure time of Geosynchronous satellite limited when observe it by optical telescope with stare mode, and the SNR (Signal Noise Ratio) of Geosynchronous satellite image could not be increased with long exposure time. In the monitoring of Geosynchronous orbit without changing hardware, a method called sub-pixel translating superposition of successive frames of images is proposed. By translating and aligning images in the sub-pixel scale according to the moving speed of the object and the time interval of the adjacent frame images, the positions of the Geosynchronous satellite in the image sequences are coincident, and then by superposition of these translational images, the SNR of moving Geosynchronous objects and the detection capability of the whole system can be improved. Results of superposition of real observed images show that the method can remarkably improve the SNR of moving. When five images are superimposed, compared with the SNR of the original image, the SNR of the superimposed image by integer pixels is increased by around 1.7 times, and the SNR of the superimposed image by sub-pixel is increased by about 2 times. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The scientific objective of the Planetary (& Lunar) Rotation Monitor (PRM) telescope is to study the terrestrial planet's (the Moon's) rotation and its interior structure and physics by in-situ observation. In order to verify the brand new principle of observations and the data processing method, the prototype of the telescope is designed and manufactured. The prototype's optical system consists of a commercial telescope and trihedron mirror set placed at the entrance of its light path to realize the capability of observing three fields of view (FOVs) simultaneously. The ground-based validation observation began in 2017, and the images containing the stars from three FOVs were achieved. Star images from different FOVs are initially mixed together, but they can be classified into the three FOVs respectively by calculating the displacement of star images on the CCD plate between two adjacent exposures, to make the observational effect be identical with three independent observations of the three FOVs respectively. After image processing, from the orientation variation of the three FOVs simultaneously in space due to the Earth's rotation, the direction of the rotation axis of the Earth in space can be derived. Its deviation from the theoretical value is about 1 ″ in average, indicating that the working principle and data processing method are effective. The main errors in observations are discussed, including the atmospheric refraction, the thermal deformation of the commercial telescope tube, the low optical resolution caused by the short focal length, the optical aberration in the multi-FOV observation, etc. It is indicated that the spatial resolution of the telescope can be enhanced with a longer focal length, and the observational reliability can be improved by optimizing the thermal deformation control. Improving the optical design in the simultaneous observation of multiple FOVs will also be helpful to the accuracy enhancement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]