1-Maybe the Library of Congress has it? Worth a search of the holdings, anyway... You have to be a researcher and set an appointment to show up in DC and read it, but they likely have a digital copy - if they have it at all - that you can access online.2-The pics you posted are mostly of ships whose location is fixed and/or well known at some particular point in time. It's not impossible to catch them, but it's exceedingly difficult to randomly find them at sea. I know this from, well, experience... And yes, most sat imagery is B/W, unless you're talking about the more recently designed birds (Maxar, Planet, BlackSky, Dig Globe, and others). But yeah, there are some really cool pics released to the public!
....The ocean is big. Spotting ships anywhere in the open ocean with a satellite is not easy, certainly not at high resolution (which also means you're looking through a straw).....
Quote from: Blackstar on 06/15/2021 08:27 pm....The ocean is big. Spotting ships anywhere in the open ocean with a satellite is not easy, certainly not at high resolution (which also means you're looking through a straw).....AIUI. Finding a ship at sea is not that hard. Identifying a ship at sea is hard. It is relatively easy to tracked ship wakes, especially if the ships are traveling at speed.
Quote from: Zed_Noir on 06/17/2021 01:34 amQuote from: Blackstar on 06/15/2021 08:27 pm....The ocean is big. Spotting ships anywhere in the open ocean with a satellite is not easy, certainly not at high resolution (which also means you're looking through a straw).....AIUI. Finding a ship at sea is not that hard. Identifying a ship at sea is hard. It is relatively easy to tracked ship wakes, especially if the ships are traveling at speed. Many satellites have a swath width of only a few kilometers. The Pacific is wider than that.
In current times, SAR and optical detection of vessel wakes and spectrographic detection of 'ship tracks' (from non-nuclear vessels) makes rapid tasking of photoreconnaissance today possible. In the early days of the first Coronas, the mysterious Quill's limited real-time SAR capability would have been the only option* - for vessels within tracks that could be captured from a ground station - in the event the co-orbiting KH-4A was able to be retasked to point at a suspected ship. The short (4 day) lifetime of Quill and 1964-085A's pointing issues make this a very unlikely possibility, and the lack of remaining information on Quill means if it happened, the only way to tell would be looking through 1964-085A/1015/OPS3358 imagery from 21-25 December for any ships that may appear. I tried to have a quick look for any out of track imaging during that time, but USGS EarthExplorer seems to be down at the moment. *Apart from happy accidents/"he sailed right under my camera!", timely non-satellite intelligence, or intercepted fleet movement plans, the latter two of which would generally be limited to activities near ports or other fixed objectives.
It seems that Derek Wood, the (London-based?) editor of Jane's weekly, was not prosecuted even though he encouraged Morison to provide secret information, met with him in Washington, DC, and paid him for the material he received? https://www.opengovva.org/foi-opinions/united-states-v-morison
On a sadder note, the Ukrainian shipyard that build both Kuznetsov and Varyag is being liquidated. https://www.secretprojects.co.uk/threads/russian-and-soviet-aircraft-carriers.1948/page-8#post-467503