A camera capturing one narrow wavelength band at a time — click a patch to see its spectral fingerprint.
What's happening
A regular camera collapses a whole scene into three broad channels: red, green, blue. A hyperspectral sensor instead records dozens to hundreds of narrow wavelength bands per pixel, building a 3D cube of (x, y, wavelength). Drag the slider to see the scene one band at a time.
This is what an ordinary camera sees: just three of those hundreds of bands, blended together.
Spectral signature
Every material reflects light differently at each wavelength — its own fingerprint. Click a patch above (currently Vegetation) to plot it below.
Look for: vegetation's sharp jump around 700 nm (the "red edge"), and water going almost black past 750 nm while soil keeps climbing. Two materials that look identical in true color can still be told apart this way.