NEW YORK - November 26, 2010 - This weekend, as you pull into the shopping mall parking lot for the hottest Black Friday sales, it’s entirely possible that your picture will be snapped by a satellite orbiting high above the Earth.

Its being done by retail-market analysts who want to know how many customers are heading to the stores, and what that means for retail stocks this season.

They’ve spotted a trend they think means this is going to be a very merry holiday shopping season.

The satellites snap pictures of hundreds of shopping malls, and analysts painstakingly count the cars in the parking lots of each one, looking to pin down the fill rates of each parking lot.

Armed with that number, analysts can compare this week’s shopping activity with the same week in 2009 and in 2008.

The company at the heart of all this satellite spying on shoppers is called Remote Sensing Metrics, a small, Chicago-based consulting firm that analyzes the satellite imagery and teases out market-moving data from the pictures it sees.

“2010 is proving to be a much better year in terms of traffic,” said Tom Diamond, CEO of Remote Sensing Metrics. “Beginning in September 2010, late back-to-school shopping discounts boosted traffic as people shopped closer to the event.”