The Washington Post built a very cool interactive globe showing Eclipse paths in your lifetime. It’s focused on the recent solar eclipse in the United States, but shows eclipses all over the world. Worth a quick look to see the map and visualization.

Planet labs automated detection of ships in ports with their satellite imagery as a way to assess economic activity.

Topos takes a look at different clustering approaches for similarity of neighborhoods and “distance” between places in Manhattan. An interesting read.

Maputnik is a new editor for styling maps. It reminds me of the first demo I saw for TileMill years ago, and looks like a great approach.

Azavea, a B Corporation that develops geospatial applications, has what looks to be a competitor for Google’s Earth Engine coming. The interface seems targeted less at developers and more at analysts and cartographers, but to truly tell, we’ll need to wait until it’s released. As someone who thinks Earth Engine is excellent, I hope both companies succeed in this space - they’re changing the game when it comes to processing earth observation data and making it far more accessible and powerful.

Can’t remember what projection has the best fit for an area you’re working in? Or are you working in a new place and want to get a sense for which projections people might use there? Projestions lets you define an area and it shows you a list of projections that cover that area. Enormously useful.

If you’ve ever wanted to develop your own projection for a custom situation, but couldn’t visualize how all the parameters worked, Flex Projector can help you. It will show you a map with a live view of your parameters so that you can quickly learn how your changes affect the map

OpenHistoricalMap is a free wiki world map for history. Time series data is often hard to obtain, and having a data source like this where people can contribute data reflecting how the world was can help us even when we already have data on what it’s like today.

Worldwide landcover data? Sure they have that - click around on the map to see land cover information for a specific location, or download the whole dataset.

This is for those of you who wanted an overwhelmingly large list of data sources. It’s well constructed and you can browse their map to find data for a region of interest.

Over 80,767,302,107,136 pixels of Sentinel-2 data, combined in a fully automated process - a cloudless Sentinel-2 map of the world, crafted by EOX and available for free under a Creative Commons license.

I can remember NDVI easily - it’s the same almost no matter what sensor I’m using. But if I’m trying to use NDWI, the Normalized Difference Water Index, there are quite a few options, and I often have to look up band combinations. That’s where IDB, the Index Database, comes in - it can show you band combinations by application or by sensor. Check out this page for detecting water as an example.

Esri announced that ArcMap 10.6 will be the *last* version of ArcMap they’re producing. Time to get on the ArcGIS Pro train. Having recently completed a few projects with it, I can say that it’s worth it, and if you know GIS already, it’s not hard to learn.

A great read on the concepts and techniques used to create spatial search algorithms, that are used in GIS to speed up display and analysis of data. A really fun dive under the hood.

Sometimes maps are wrong - here’s a humorous story of how Microsoft researched and handled an error in the very accurate maps in an edition of their Flight Simulator game series.

Currently, flying LiDAR on a drone system is expensive and heavy - Velodyne is now talking about $100-$1000 LiDAR systems for autonomous cars - I’m imagining them for a UAV or other GIS uses instead. Really interesting to watch.

Most Americans could not identify the country in a survey, and those people tended to view military action more favorably.

Way back in May, at the height of some of the other scandals hitting the Trump Administration in the USA, the director of the US Census, which studies where people are in the US, resigned. Here’s why this agency, with spatial information at the core of its mission, is important.