Aerial Photographs
Aerial photographs are available here for the St. Olaf campus and campus lands for the years 1938, 1958, and 1970 and 1995. The earlier photographs (1938-1995) were black and white photographs and were scanned from photos located at the Borchert Map Library at the University of Minnesota. The 1995 photographs were flown for St. Olaf by Mark Hurd and were made available to us by Jim Fisher. With the exception of 1970, each year is represented by multiple overlapping images. All of these photos are in a *.tif format users of Arcview or other GIS programs who want to work with data that have been georeferenced will also find trailer files that containshould georeferencing data. All images have been morphed to fit a 10m resolution DOQ for the area and hence modified some to correct for distortions due to elevational differences or the camera on the plane. This morphing process is not complete and so caution should be used when using the images since structures and other features depicted in the photograph may be distorted in appearance or be not located at the correct spot (notice how roads don't line up exactly).
The 1938 aerials were flown on June 2, 1938, the 1958 photos were flown July 29, 1958, the date for the 1970 photo is unknown while the 1995 photos were flown May, 1995. The 1970 aerial is blurry because it was taken from a photo that was flown at a higher altitude and lower resolution.
Aerial Coverages for GIS (includes tif and trailer files. WARNING: THESE ARE LARGE FILES!!)