Looking to buy a home in California? You will need to make $120,120 per year to afford an average home. Check out this article and map of the US showing what your annual salary must be to afford an average home.
Interesting article about mapping the ocean floor. I did not know that only 15% of the ocean floor has been mapped so far. An idea to “crowd source” ocean floor mapping is taking hold, using volunteer cargo ships, fishing boats, and pleasure craft to transmit data in real time.
Radio Garden is an interactive globe that allows visitors to listen to over 8,000 live radio stations from around the world. When you visit the site, radio stations are loaded and then you will be directed to the radio station closest to your current location. From there, you can explore other stations around the globe. Cities with multiple participating stations will have a list appear on the right side of the browser, allowing you to choose which station to listen to. By selecting the History tab or the Jingles tab, you can explore historic radio broadcasts and station jingles from across time and space. Check it out!
Do you have a globe collection? Sign up for the webinar “Caring for Your Historic Globe Collection” for May 17 and keep those globes spinning! The webinar will cover storage, handling, display, and general care of your globes.
Check out this Library of Congress post about the “father of temperature mapping”, Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859), who devised the concept of the isotherm. Cool maps!
The US National Park Service boasts an extensive, well-designed website that features resources for educators, nature lovers, history enthusiasts, and anyone interested in learning more about the many U.S. national parks and sites. Check out the Find a Park page, which allows you to quickly locate parks and historic sites of interest. Using the interactive map, you can find parks by state and view a variety of statistics about park visitors and land area in each state. You can also conduct a text search to find a particular park. You can also scroll down on the main page to check out a list of fee-free days at national parks.
January 2023 NOTE: The Stuff in Space website has moved. The link to the site has been updated.
Stuff in Space is a “real-time 3D map of objects in earth’s orbit”, including satellites and debris. This map uses data from Space-Track.org, a website operated by the U.S. Department of Defense. On this map, different kinds of “stuff in space” are color-coded: red for satellites, blue for rocket bodies, and grey for debris. Visitors may also explore different groups of space objects, which include maps of all Global Positioning System (GPS) satellites and their orbits and a map of the debris created by the 2009 collision of the satellites Iridium 33 and Kosmos 2251. Check it out!
Astronauts on board the International Space Station (ISS) take hundreds of night-time pictures each year of cities around the globe. Cities at Night is a “citizen science project that aims to create a map, similar to Google maps, of the Earth at night using night-time color photographs taken by astronauts onboard the ISS.” Check out the photographs that have been geo-referenced to the Earth, or join in and help the project team geo-reference new photographs!
In celebration of the summer 2018 launch of the Parker Solar Probe, NASA is inviting the public to submit their names to be added to a microchip which will be placed onboard the spacecraft.
Read more about it on Geo Lounge (click image below), which also has a link to the site for you to register your name. But hurry, you must submit your name by April 27, 2018!
The Chinese space station Tiangong-1 was launched in 2011. It stopped communicating with ground control back in March 2016. With no way to bring it down into a controlled descent, it is now slowly falling closer to Earth’s atmosphere. Scientists have only been able to wait for its orbit to decay and now it’s expected to tumble to the ground or ocean in the next few days.
Both amateurs and government agencies are trying to figure out where and when it will arrive. Some sites like SatView are running live streams of Tiangong-1’s current location and predict where it might fall to Earth.
The most current prediction at the time of this writing is Monday April 2 at 01:05 UTC. Check it out!
SoCalGIS.org 