Underfunded academics and other LiDAR lunatics that (honestly) have no budget for a full academic LAStools license and do interesting (non-profit) work may – under certain circumstances and in limited numbers – qualify for a few LASmoons of full LAStools functionality. These complimentary licenses typically last three full lunar cycles you can watch the night sky to see how hard you need to work to finish in time (and because it’s more fun) … (-;

The idea is that you get your experiments ready as far as possible (with the unlicensed version) to make best possible use your LASmoonshine. You need to provide a few well-written paragraphs about your research and how you are using LAStools to process your data. Also provide one or more illustrating images, your name, your affiliation, a link to your research lab, and the implied permission for these materials to be featured on our blog. The text and the images need to be of sufficient quality to be published without (m)any edits. After all your LASmoons have set you are expected to provide a short report describing your workflow and one or more result images.

Below the upcoming 2020 full moons in Eastern Standard or Eastern Daylight time to plan ahead. As an example: if you were to qualify for three LASmoons on June 4th or on May 21st then your LAStools license would last until September 2nd.

I’ll keep you in my client and reminder list.I cannot invest much time into editing your materials, so it is important that your follow these instructions: Provide the text as a simple ASCII file with the standard *.txt ending. Make sure your text does not have any strange characters (check by opening the file in notepad). Name the text file  ‘lasmoons_first_last.txt’ with your real name taking the place of ‘first’ and ‘last’. Provide image(s) in PNG or JPG format with standard 4:3 landscape ratio (e.g. 1024×768 or 1200×900 pixels). Simply name the image files ‘lasmoons_first_last_0.png’, … etc. Check what past and current “LASmoonies” have submitted. Send text and image files to lasmoons@rapidlasso.com. Do *not* send a Word document as this will disqualify you automatically … (-: Here the legal bit: There are absolutely no guarantees for anything
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