National High Altitude Photography

The National High Altitude Photography (NHAP) program, which was operated from 1980 - 1989, was coordinated by the U.S. Geological Survey as an interagency project to eliminate duplicate photography in various Government programs. The aim of the program was to cover the 48 conterminous states of the USA over a 5-year span. In the NHAP program, black-and-white and color-infrared aerial photographs were obtained on 9-inch film from an altitude of 40,000 feet above mean terrain elevation and are centered over USGS 7.5-minute quadrangles. The color-infrared photographs are at a scale of 1:58,000 (1 inch equals about .9 miles) and the black-and-white photographs are at a scale of 1:80,000 (1 inch equals about 1.26 miles).