Georeferencing Challenges - Ouch!

WOW!

This lab was meant to be a challenging two months of showing what I can do with GIS. It has been! With only one assignment left (the Final Project), Week Six proved to be a painful learning experience. 

For the first map, seen below, there were several elements to prepare. We started by Georeferencing a raster image file of UWF's North campus. This one was not too bad, and I gained some confidence with placing the control points and making the image fit with a relatively low RMS error. It was a great start for a beginner, and this task is new to me. 

The second part of the first map was Georeferencing a raster image of UWF's south campus, and this one was a bit more challenging. Although it took a little longer and I had to juggle more control points, I was able to keep my RMS error under 15 and make it happen.

The last part... an engineering survey image of a section of UWF's campus that needed to be Georeferenced - was absolutely puzzling. I am not sure if I am overthinking it or not at this point, but I spent literally days attempting to fit this image. One side looks great - the other side appears to be completely incorrect, and I eventually had to move on. I asked around at my SWFWMD internship and, although they all seemed to be confident with their Georeferencing skills in ArcMap, were able to help me improve what I had, but not fix the major problem I had matching the SW corner of the map. Some good that came out of it - I now know the Georeferencing tool bar extremely well from attempting to complete this correctly so many times. 

Probably a technical aspect, we included a proximity inset map to show a buffered Eagle's Nest location in relation to the UWF campus. I also included a general location inset map to help with orientation:

After I finally finished the monstrous project above, I started the last part of the assignment - which was refreshing. The map, seen below, shows the same raster images with a source layer that allowed us to make it into a 3D image/scene. I enjoyed the 'retro' look of this map and had a little fun with the font.

The most challenging part of this entire assignment was 'seeing' the data in order to properly present it in a map. This assignment came with a ton of information, and a detailed grading rubric, and I am still wondering whether or not I have met expectations. Usually, even if I get stuck and run a little late, I feel pretty confident with my work. This time, I would love to see other results/perspectives for a better idea of where I stand. Ultimately,  it feels like an accomplishment to have submitted this assignment. 

Now, I feel much better using Georeferencing. The navigation in ArcGIS Pro is becoming more natural for me, and less difficult images should be a snap compared to complexity of the raster images used for this lab.