Filter (Restrict) the images shown with the Load Images window (icon on the toolbar in upper left, window appears in the upper right). The more restricted, the easier it is to find what you want.
- Years
- Days--Landsat has 14 day coverage. You might pick a particular season
- Cloud coverage--in the desert you can pick 0%, and in a rain forest you are lucky to get whatever you find.
- Sensors
- Sentinel-2
- Landsat 8 has OLI
- Landsat 7 has ETM+ (in its old age, its images have artefacts on the edges of the swath during to a scan line corrector failure, so you will see diagonal striping)
- Landat 4 and 5 have ETM
- Landsats 1-3 have MSS (but apparently no downloads)
Suggested Starting points:
- The month we will be in Egypt
- 0% clouds
- Landsat 8, Landsat 4/5, and Landsat 1/3
Zoom in to the location you want. Search lets you pick:
- Point (x in long, y is lat)
- Bounding box
- Grid (the path/row; you want WRS2)
Imagery does not appear until you zoom in to below 1:1M scale. Show images button will show them. This can be slow if you have a large area, or a loose filter, and a lot of scenes.
Export image will not include any enhancements
- Will be relatively slow to generate, and the file name will not indicate the location or date. If you want to do anything with it, you should save to the hard disk with the date. You can get the date from the Modify images window.
- Geotiff, and pick the geographic (WGS84) option: Save the resulting file to the hard disk. You can show in MICRODEM with correct geometry, but you must have GDAL installed since the imagery comes tiled. Photos and Paint from Windows will both display the Geotiff, but without coordinates. The GIS program will show coordinates and allow you to display other layers on top of the imagery.
- PNG, JPG, or BMP: save the image as a graphic, and display it in the browser.
To download full data, pick "Show Metadata" at the bottom of the screen.
- Check the path/row carefully to insure you get the one you want. If you have zoomed in enough, there should only be one path/row to choose from.
- You must be signed into a USGS account.
- Pick the download icon on the far right.
- You want the level 1 Geotiff (about 1 GB for Landsat 8, to about 200 MB for Landat 4/5)
- You want the "Standard product" if you want to do detailed analysis and are willing to do big downloads
- Use MICRODEM or 7zip to uncompress the Unix tar.gz files.
- You can get the LandsatLook Images with Geographic Reference which will look just like the imagery on the web page, which will be a zip file