Off-Site Insight by First Base Solutions

Watch live coverage of the launch     Markham, ON, Wednesday, August 13, 2014 – With just a few hours left, we are eagerly anticipating the launch of WorldView-3, DigitalGlobe’s most sophisticated high resolution imaging satellite ever put into orbit! Watch the launch live August 13, 2014 from Vandenberg Air Force Base, California at 2:30 p.m. EDT via the ground-to-orbit webcast provided by United Launch Alliance. Tune in about 20 minutes early and you’ll be able to hear the countdown!

Chapter Review: Tracking Animals in a Dynamic Environment: Remote Sensing Image Time Series   Prominent theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking tells us that time is a property of matter, just like colour, mass, or temperature; without matter, time does not exist. Doc Brown in the Back To The Future movie trilogy tells us we must think fourth dimensionally in order to travel through time safely. The reality is, everyone and everything is traveling through time, all day, every day, at the minuscule but consistent rate of one second per second. Unfortunately for us in the mapping biz, this time travel stuff really complicates things since our traditional paper maps are only 2-dimensional and digital mapping is 3-dimensional at best. Since the beginning of, er… well, time, incorporating temporal information into spatial models has been challenging and is often outright excluded from consideration. Since time affects so much of the world around us, it just makes good sense to...

First Base Solutions not affected by worldwide security breach Markham, ON, Thursday, April 10, 2014 – A major flaw with online security was recently discovered that can be exploited to intercept sensitive information like passwords, private conversations, and credit card numbers. This flaw, known as CVE-2014-0160, The Heartbleed Bug, has affected over 60 million websites around the world from Yahoo to Canada Revenue Agency.

The past, present, and future of remote sensing    From Icarus to Yertle the Turtle, the desire for a view from above transcends history and culture. Beginning thousands of years ago with kites and gliders, to Da Vinci's “ornithopter”, to hot air and helium filled balloons, to modern day avionics, humanity has invented countless contraptions to get airborne.  The technology has improved dramatically in just the last 100 years since the Wright brothers took flight at Kitty Hawk, NC in 1903. 

How to Source Commercial Satellite Imagery When Google Earth was launched in 2005, high resolution satellite imagery suddenly became easily accessible to anyone with an Internet connection.  Much of this high-resolution imagery (50-60 cm) is provided by Digital Globe and can be used for a wide range of commercial applications such as urban planning, engineering, utilities and more.  Satellite imagery is a great option for mapping large, remote or inaccessible areas where orthophoto is not available.  So, how is the imagery captured, and how can a commercial user purchase the imagery?