For those of you that have read this blog for a while, you might remember me mentioning the Great American Solar Eclipse for 2017 in a post back in October 2015! Well, it looks like the media woke up about it, because it is all over the news now. It is finally here, just one week away on August 21st! More info here.
Are you going to travel up north or to the east to see it? Below is a handy map showing how may hours it will take you to drive to the closest area to view the total solar eclipse:
Interesting article in GIS Professional magazine about using drones and GIS to map saltmarshes in Scotland. Check it out.
For you map collectors, here is a list of new maps and books that might interest you:
Kaufmann, Obi. The California field atlas. 1 atlas (608 pages), scales differ. Berkeley, Calif.: Heyday, pub. 2017. ISBN: 9781597144025
Mad Maps. Scenic road trips of Northern California: Avenue of the Giants, the Lost Coast, Napa & Sonoma, Mount Hamilton, Santa Cruz Mountains, Monterey & Carmel. 1 map, scale ca. 1:600,000. San Francisco, Calif.: Mad Maps, pub. 2016. ISBN: 9781933911397
National Geographic Maps. Mojave National Preserve, California. 1 map, scale 1:125,000. Evergreen, Colo.: National Geographic Maps, Trails Illustrated topographic map 256, pub. 2016. ISBN: 9781566953832
Thought that traditional paper maps are dead? Well, at least not yet! Here is a Minneapolis mapmaker that has stayed in business making custom maps in niche markets from dog parks to UFO sightings.
Guerrilla Cartography has a kickstarter for their upcoming Water Atlas project. Contribution options include adding your location to the collaborators map, receiving a copy of the book, or even donating a copy of the book to your favorite school, library, or community center with your name printed on the inside cover. Check it out.
Thanks goes to Chandler Sterling for pointing this one out!
Interesting infographics and maps about roadway fatalities by substance type. Data includes drug and alcohol related roadway deaths from 1995 to 2013. Looks like LA County drivers like stimulants.
World Imagery Firefly was created for thematic maps. Currently in beta, Firefly is an alternative view of the default World Imagery basemap, and is designed with desaturated colors. When zoomed out, the map appears grayscale, but as you zoom in, the colors become more saturated until the full color detail of the imagery appears. World Imagery Firefly is especially useful for overlays of brightly styled layers when you want an imagery basemap, but do not want the imagery to compete with the layer styling. Check it out.
If you like to make stuff, maybe making a laser cut Dymaxion Globe is something you would like to do? Click below to read the article and download the needed files for your laser cutter … you have one right?
July 4th will be here soon and that means Fireworks! The fireworks app I have used for the past few years has been updated. It includes the cities in LA, Orange, Ventura, and Riverside County. If you love fireworks and want to find out where you can legally buy and shoot them off in SoCal, check out the app!
If your organization participates in LARIAC, then you probably know that right now you have Early Access to the 2017 imagery (both orthos and obliques) in Pictometry’s online CONNECTExplorer application. Keep in mind the Early Access imagery still has work to be done on it, but at least you can take a look at the new stuff while they are working on it.
One thing you can do is bring some of the ortho imagery into your ArcGIS Desktop environment. Here are the simple steps to do so:
The GeoTIFF images are actually using geographic coordinates (WGS84), but they reproject very well into State Plane.
This is a very quick way to bring in the new 2017 Early Access imagery into your maps if you need to. As the imagery is cleaned up and worked on to create preliminary images, there will be map services setup for you to consume in your applications. But for now, you can use these steps. Enjoy! -mike
SoCalGIS.org 