Side scan sonar parses the continual echo returns from a receive beam that is perfectly aligned with the insonification beam using time-after-transmit, a technique that is independent of water depth and the cross-track beam opening angle of the sonar receive transducer. The initial attempt at multibeam imagery employed multiple receive beams, which only partially overlapped the MBES fan-shaped insonification beam, to segment the continual echo returns into intervals that were dependent on water depth and receiver cross-track beam opening angle. Consequently, the segemented intervals were non-uniform in both their length of time and time-after-transmit. The backscatter from each ping in each of the beam-parsed segments was reduced to a single value and assigned to the same geographical coordinates as those assigned to that beam's measured sounding. In subsequent modifications to MBES bottom imaging, the echo sequence in each of the beam-parsed intervals was designated as a snippet. On each ping, each snippet from each beam was additionally parsed according to time-after-transmit. Each of the echo amplitude measurements made within a snippet from a particular beam was assigned a geographical position based on linear interpolation between positions assigned to the soundings measured, on that ping, in the two adjacent cross-track beams. The snippet modification to MBES imagery significantly improved the quality of the imagery by increasing the number of echo amplitude measurements available to be rendered as a pixel in the image and also by having a more uniform spatial distribution of the pixels in the image which represented an actual measured echo amplitude.