Vancouver-based UrtheCast has big plans for cameras on space station

TORONTO If youre planning on getting married outdoors, you will soon be able to have it pictured from space.

This could happen thanks to the Vancouver-based company Urthecast (pronounced Earth-cast) that had two of its cameras installed on the International Space Station (ISS) by two Russian cosmonauts Monday morning.

The companys cameras a still camera and a high-resolution video camera are set to make the unique view of Earth accessible to anyone with an Internet connection.

READ MORE: Russian cosmonauts undertake spacewalk to hook up Canadian-madecamera

The camera that was made by Vancouver-based UrtheCast, was mounted on the space station on Jan. 27, by two Russian cosmonauts. It will begin to transmit images of Earth in near real-time.

The video camera has a one-metre resolution that can be swivelled around and pointed at particular locations.

Scott Larson, CEO of UrtheCast said that the still camera can be used for wide-area coverage. Organizations can use it for a variety of tools, including agricultural monitoring, urban planning or mapping.

People take pictures of the coffee farms in South America to determine if itll be a good year for coffee or bad; is the price of coffee going to go up or down? Theyll take pictures of Walmarts parking lot to count cars in the parking lot to be able to determine same-store sales, based on how many cars are in each parking lot. So theres lots of business intelligence, lots of government-agency stuff, ministry of forestry, farming, agriculture, resource-management mapping and so forth.

But the video camera can be moved around and pointed at something else with an incredible resolution of just one metre.

If you imagine the space stations going over Hamilton, and one camera is pointed directly down, taking a picture of the suburbsthe other camera, we decide we want to point over downtown Toronto, Larson told Global News. Well take a 90-second video at what we call a 1-metre resolution So, cars, buses, boats, planes, groups of people youll never see the guy mowing the lawn in the backyard, but you can see a golf cart. And well take 150 of those videos, full colour, every day.

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Vancouver-based UrtheCast has big plans for cameras on space station