Hasta La Gadget!

Japanese camera company Pentax today launched a very cool new add on to their digital SLR cameras which wil have camera enthusiasts and star gazers alike excited. The new product is a GPS unit which along with giving basic location data to automatically geo tag your snaps, also contains a tracking system for “celestial bodies”.

The new piece of camera kit easily mounts onto the hotshoe of any of the Pentax SLR cameras and records various location data onto captured images including: the latitude, longitude, altitude, universal time coordinated (UTC) and direction of the shooting. The user can then later use programs such as Google Earth to pull up the exact spot the photo was shot from.

The very cool “Astrotracer” function is a particularly interesting inovation which automatically follows stars, planets or other objects in the sky capturing clear images even on long exposures. The system works by calculating the movement of the stars using latitude obtained from GPS data and the cameras alignment obtained from its magnetic acceleration sensors. The image sensor then shifts automatically tracking the movement in real time. UFO hunting just got a lot easier!!

Location based technology and geo-tagging is becoming very popular and with sites such as foursquare we could see this kind of technology being linked in to a number of new platforms. It won’t be long before photo sharing sites team up with location based sites to take full advantage of the new technology.

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