SkyWatch supports not only a wide range of businesses but, in some cases, we even support hobbyists.
Benjamin Pittet, founder of BAP Intel in Switzerland launched his career in private intelligence with a blog, Twitter, and satellite data. Through our platform EarthCache, and our amazing satellite imagery providers, we completed our mission. Together, we made commercial satellite imagery accessible to someone outside of the geospatial industry and solved a real-world problem.
Here is BAP Intel’s Story.
A Growing Interest in Geospatial Intelligence (GEOINT)
“I became interested in GEOINT through the work of many experts I followed on Twitter” (Pittet, 2022). Through social media and blogging, Pittet began collecting satellite imagery and practiced analyzing the imagery to detect movement on the Ukrainian border. When the Russian military began deployment, Pittet used EarthCache to source imagery for object detection of archival imagery.
Beginning with free satellite data via the Sentinel Hub platform, Pittet documented and monitored the movement of the Russian military. But after a few analyses, Pittet switched to SkyWatch as the need for high definition images grew for this project and SkyWatch could provide them on a small budget.
The Technical Elements Used by BAP Intel
Temporal resolution: Due to a small budget, Pittet used Archival imagery with very low temporal resolution. In certain projects, there may be a need for a higher temporal resolution, but at the beginning of BAP Intel’s journey, low did the trick.
Spatial resolution: the use cases by BAP Intel typically required a resolution of 0.8m/pixel. Evidently having access to high resolution imagery was critical for most of Pittet’s work.
Spectral resolution: NIR bands were found to be useful in modifying the images for BAP Intel’s projects. In time, Pittet intends to strengthen his knowledge of different bands and how to use them for environmental research.
Latency: Low latency was very important to Pittet considering the rapidly changing environment he was monitoring.
Object detection: was the common use case type for BAP Intel’s project. Based on the technical elements provided by SkyWatch, BAP Intel met the need to monitor Ukrainian borders. Considering that Pittet was an amateur analyst, this is incredibly inspiring.
Through the use of high resolution imagery, close monitoring, and thorough documentation, this hobbyist became a professional. BAP Intel’s story has a great influence on other hobby analysts.
“Since I started using your services, friends and other members of the OSINT and IMINT hobbyist community have started using SkyWatch to produce high-quality documents.”
Pittet, 2022
BAP Intel's story is unique and demonstrates one of the many uses for satellite imagery. From a hobbyist to a professional analyst we are proud to support Pittet's aspirations.