Jeff Harrison

Happy vernal equinox! 🍀 Today marks the first day of spring in the Northern Hemisphere and the first day of autumn in the Southern Hemisphere. After today, the Sun will shine more directly on the Northern Hemisphere than on the Southern Hemisphere until the autumnal equinox.

BREAKING: Iranian Supreme Leader Khamenei's residence has reportedly been completely destroyed.

I painstakingly sliced up a clementine to visualize the distortion of webmercator, and humbly submit this graphic to the mapping community! #gistribe #gischat #webmapping @chris.m.whong/visualizing-the-distortion-of-webmercator-maps-with-an-orange-peel-cb04460b6415?postPublishedType=initial" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">medium.com/@chris.m.whong…

In FY25, Releasable Basemap Tiles will be distributed in additional map projections. It is currently available in the Army Standard WGS 84 / World Mercator. We will add the WGS 84 / Pseudo-Mercator and World Geodetic System 1984 in order to support other Army and DoD systems.

This photo of Earth, dubbed the Blue Marble, was taken by the Apollo 17 crew #OTD in 1972 as they traveled to the Moon. It soon became one of the most widely-distributed photographs in history.

#AcronymsYouShouldKnow. BTIS or the draft Basemap Tile Interoperability Standard gives Army, Joint and Coalition systems and applications a common interface to request basemaps, with multiple styling options, delivered using significantly less storage than current systems.

The Combined Arms Rehearsal theater is dead. If you’re still building one in 2025, you’re not training for LSCO—you’re planning your own funeral. Picture it: 300 leaders in a hangar, 47 projectors, 12 hours of rock-drill perfection, brigade commander walking the miniature terrain like a god scripting every bound. Meanwhile the enemy’s recon-strike complex just watched the whole thing from orbit: thermal bloom of the hangar, 300 cell phones pinging the same tower, every vehicle parked in neat rows outside for the satellite pass. Day-1 of war: that rehearsal site is the first precision grid removed from the map. Day-2: every CP you just rehearsed in place is gone. Day-3: the brigade commander is either underground or dead, and nobody has comms because we never trained without them. GWOT taught us that perfect synchronization wins. LSCO teaches us that perfect synchronization is a targeting signature. Your 96-hour Exchecl and sync mat -perfect scheme dies in the first 30 minutes when: - Every emitter is a beacon - Every static node is a target - Every rehearsal of record becomes the enemy’s pre-planned fire plan Mission Command isn’t a nice-to-have. It is the only thing that survives when the sky is full of drones and the brigade commander’s voice is a memory. Yet we still measure readiness by how pretty the rehearsal looks, not by how violently a company can attack when higher is burning and the net is black. Stop building theaters. Start building leaders who can fight with a map, a compass, and two sentences of intent. Because in LSCO the rehearsal isn’t in a hangar. It’s the enemy dropping 40 loitering munitions on the exact grid you spent three days perfecting. Perfection is the enemy of survival. Control is the fast lane to the grave. Kill the GWOT rehearsal culture or it kills you. #RehearsalTheaterIsCoffinNail #LSCO #MissionCommandOrExtinction #CPTargetingEndsControl

#DYK. The Releasable Basemap Tiles (#RBT) program has developed a "Lite" version that provides a global basemap in multiple styles, using only 3.5 GB of storage. RBT Lite lets users access data down to about a 1:100,000-scale for strategic and operational level missions.

Globus INK, a Soviet era mechanical spaceflight navigation system from the 1960s. It featured a rotating, 5" globe to display the spacecraft's real-time position relative to Earth and calculated orbital parameters using an intricate system of gears, cams, and differentials. Photo by Ken Shirriff

#TechnologyTransfer. @ArmyGeospatial recently transferred its next-gen technology for Releasable Basemap Tiles (RBT) to @NGA_GEOINT cloud locations. This means RBT will now be available for Army, Joint and Coalition Partners! #CommonBasemaps

Back to the future? ;-)… Software uses terrain mapping to guide UAVs when navigation satellite signals are jammed or unavailable spacenews.com/taiwanese-aero…

I’m proud of this one. I brought a solar telescope to Florida to capture a Falcon 9 rocket launch transiting the sun. While these have been captured before, never with the details of the sun’s chromosphere, which makes this one the first! See the video or get the print below 👇

#DYK the Releasable Basemap Tiles (#RBT) program is working to rapidly update basemaps using DoD-approved software approaches. They are using Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery processes to efficiently deliver up-to-date global basemaps... potentially every week.

Today we remember. On September 11, 2001, nearly 3,000 innocent lives were taken in a single act of terror. In the days, months, and years that followed, Americans stood united in grief, resilience, and resolve. We honor the victims, their families, and the countless first responders who ran toward danger. We also remember the service members who answered the nation’s call in the years that followed, carrying the fight forward. We will never forget. Semper Fidelis. #911Anniversary #NeverForget #USMC #Marines

📢 MapLibre August 2025 Newsletter is out! 🙏 Thanks to @Microsoft for becoming a Gold Sponsor 🗳️ New Voting Members 🎉 Slint SDK for MapLibre Native 👥 Sponsoring @IndiaFOSS & ticket giveaway 📖 Read more: maplibre.org/news/2025-09-0… #openstreetmap #maplibre #foss4g #opensource

.@ArmyGeospatial's Releasable Basemap Tiles (RBT) #maps can be styled for every need. Easily change the way your maps look ... topo map style by day or dark style by night! You can also customize your map with satellite images, 3D buildings, or your own data.

Israel launches its new Ofek 19 spy satellite with SAR technology, enhancing under any-weather surveillance and monitoring threats like Iranian missile systems. mintelworld.com/israel-launche…

Documentation leads to understanding! @ArmyGeospatial finalized the first training handbook for Releasable Basemap Tiles (#RBT). The Features Guide provides an easy handbook to train Army Engineers and other users on the features displayed on RBT Topo Style maps.

This We'll Defend.

MapLibre Tile: A Next Generation Vector Tile Format arxiv.org/abs/2508.10791