The Map Room

Yesterday’s APOD was a map of the 50,000 nearest galaxies in infrared light, based on data collected by the Two Micron All-Sky Survey (io9).

Wired Science on astronomers’ efforts to map the distant (and young) universe. “Previous versions plotted the locations of galaxies within 7 billion light-years of Earth. The new version, however, charts clouds of hydrogen in a swath between 10 billion and 12 billion light-years away — farther in distance and deeper in time than any 3-D map before it.” Via @jpmaps.

Even asteroids get place names: 36 features on the asteroid Lutetia have been assigned names. Lutetia is only 130 km across along the major axis, but it was visited by the Rosetta probe last year. Via The Planetary Society Blog.

“Uncle” Rod Mollise takes a close look at free star chart software Cartes du Ciel, “a classic of astronomy software, and thanks to the selfless and tireless efforts of its author it’s still as up-to-date and as wonderful as ever.”

Previously: Uncle Rod Looks at Star Atlases.

Well, not quite — but you can view Mercury imagery in Google Earth by downloading a KML file. That sounds like a very good way to peruse all that new imagery from the MESSENGER spacecraft, now orbiting the planet, in its geographical context.

The Ordnance Survey Blog explains why “space weather” — such as the coronal mass ejection the Sun let loose this week — is bad news for mapmaking: solar flares disrupt navigation satellite accuracy. During a space weather event, sat nav…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Michael Zeiler, GIS professional by day, eclipse mapper by night — last April I blogged about his map of solar eclipses from 2010 to 2050 — is back with a whole website dedicated to solar eclipse maps. The site,…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Data from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter’s Lunar Orbiter Laser Altimeter (LOLA) is leading to “the most precise and complete map to date of the moon’s complex, heavily cratered landscape,” NASA said last week. The new LOLA maps are more…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Oh look: two blogs about mapping other bodies in the solar system by planetary scientist Paul Schenk: Dr. Schenk’s 3D House of Satellites, about stereo, perspective and topographic maps of moons and dwarf planets (thanks to recent Cassini data,…  •  Continue reading this entry.

3-D Starmaps is a website by Winchell Chung about science fiction star maps: it has resources for science fiction writers interested in generating their own star maps (including how to plot them on a three-dimensional grid), discusses the real-world locations…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Thermal maps of the Moon have been released by Chinese researchers. The maps were constructed from data collected by the microwave radiometer aboard the Chang’e 1 lunar orbiter. The maps display the brightness temperature of the lunar regolith during…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Aurorae are in the news due to the recent coronal mass ejection; NOAA’s maps of auroral activity are found on this page. “The plots on this page show the current extent and position of the auroral oval at each…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Three related astronomy-related items: Microsoft’s Terapixel project reprocesses images from the Digitized Sky Survey and makes “the largest and clearest image of the night sky ever produced” available in Bing Maps and WorldWide Telescope. More at HPCWire. Via Gizmodo. Staying…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Last year, Sky and Telescope’s Tony Flanders questioned the accuracy of the standard light-pollution maps, noting that in certain areas, local conditions were considerably darker than the maps indicated. Now Tony reports on some new developments: In a recent…  •  Continue reading this entry.

A project mapping the geology of Mars has discovered what has been interpreted as sedimentary deposits on the eastern rim of Hellas Planitia, suggesting that large bodies of water once existed on the Martian surface: Planetary Science Institute press…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The Astronomy blog makes mention of The Great Atlas of the Sky, “the world’s largest printed atlas of the entire sky,” by Polish astronomer Piotr Brych. “The 296 foldout maps, each measuring 17 inches by 24 inches, depict the…  •  Continue reading this entry.

My regular readers will know that I’m a big fan of maps of other worlds, and that, for example, whenever the Cassini Imaging Team team updates a map of one of the moons of Saturn based on new imagery from…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The Jet Propulsion Laboratory continues to release updated maps of Saturn’s moons based on Cassini imagery. Yesterday was the turn of the fourth-largest Saturnian moon, Dione: JPL released two polar stereographic maps of the northern and southern hemispheres, as…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Regarding my previous post about solar eclipse maps, Michael Zeiler writes to point to his map of solar eclipses from 2010 to 2050 (4 MB PDF), which uses a Mollweide projection (which he prefers to cylindrical projections used in…  •  Continue reading this entry.

On the Planetary Society Blog (one of my favourites), Emily Lakdawalla reviews two apps that put virtual globes of the Moon and Mars on an iPhone or iPod touch: Moon Globe, which is (now) free, and Mars Globe, which is…  •  Continue reading this entry.

There are an awful lot of maps showing the path of solar eclipses. These maps are vital to eclipse chasers, who spend vast sums travelling to places where they can see one, and those slightly less insane who nevertheless…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The Known Universe, a short film from the American Museum of Natural History, “shows the known universe as mapped through astronomical observations,” zooming out from the Himalayas to the Cosmic Microwave Background and back in again. Via Christian Junk….  •  Continue reading this entry.

NASA has released new maps of Pluto, taken by the Hubble Space Telescope’s Advanced Camera for Surveys. Even through the Hubble, everyone’s favourite Kuiper Belt Object is only a handful of pixels across, and the Hubble can only make…  •  Continue reading this entry.

High-resolution digital terrain models (DTMs) of the Martian surface, created from stereo images taken by the HiRISE camera aboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. The upshot is an extremely detailed topographic/terrain map of the Martian surface — think the Terrain…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Three flybys by the MESSENGER probe have revealed much more of Mercury’s surface, and the MESSENGER team and the U.S. Geological Survey have taken the images from those passes (plus earlier Mariner 10 data) to produce a global mosaic…  •  Continue reading this entry.

New imagery from the High Resolution Stereo Camera on the ESA’s Mars Express orbiter has been added to Mars in Google Earth. “With these updates, nearly half of the martian surface is covered by imagery having a nominal resolution of…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The Linda Hall Library of Science, Engineering and Technology in Kansas City, Missouri gets a mention in the travel section of the New York Times (in an article on rare book collections that are accessible to the public) for its…  •  Continue reading this entry.

More maps of Saturn’s moon Enceladus, in the form of two polar stereographic maps released today for its northern and southern hemispheres. The maps are mosaics compiled from the best Cassini and Voyager images. Image credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute….  •  Continue reading this entry.

Here’s a map of the Moon generated by laser altimeter data from the Japanese lunar probe Kaguya, which has just been released. In this image, brighter/yellow is higher elevation, darker/red is lower elevation. This map is centred on the…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Astrum 2009: Astronomy and Instruments, an exhibition of astronomical equipment, celestial globes and manuscripts taking place at the Vatican Museums until January 16, 2010, includes equipment like astrolabes and planetariums, and 16th- and 17th-century celestial globes by Coronelli and Vanosino….  •  Continue reading this entry.

A new map of Enceladus has been released by the Cassini imaging team, just before Cassini makes another flyby of the Saturnian moon next week. Compared to the previous Enceladus map released in December 2008 (see PIA11145), the new…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Astronomy reports that the Planetary Science Institute has released “the first detailed maps that show the amount of dry ice (solid carbon dioxide) deposited in the polar regions of Mars. The maps reveal how the ice thickness varies with…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The plains (planitia) of Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, will be named after planets from Frank Herbert’s Dune series. The first of these, Chusuk Planitia, already appears on this map of Titan (PDF). The map looks spectacularly incomplete because Titan’s…  •  Continue reading this entry.

An upcoming exhibition at the University of Texas at Austin’s Harry Ransom Center, Other Worlds: Rare Astronomical Works commemorates the International Year of Astronomy by “showcasing items from the center’s science collection that survey some of the most important…  •  Continue reading this entry.

As anticipated, a 3D model of the Moon has been added to Google Earth on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing. (See also Google Earth Blog.) Features include all kinds of content for the…  •  Continue reading this entry.

A new infrared map of Venus’s southern hemisphere suggests that Venus may have been tectonically active at one point — oceans, volcanic activity and continents included. The map was compiled from more than a thousand images from an instrument…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Some reviews of mapping applications for the iPhone and iPod touch. Peter reviews OffMaps, a $2 app (for the moment) that not only uses OpenStreetMap data, but also allows you to download the map data locally (handy if you’re…  •  Continue reading this entry.

This false-colour map of the Moon’s south polar region is based on imagery collected using the Deep Space Network’s Goldstone Solar System Radar in California; see previous entry. Via NASA’s Twitter feed….  •  Continue reading this entry.

Divine Sky: The Artistry of Astronomical Maps is a small online exhibition featuring a selection of celestial maps from the library holdings of the University of Michigan. Divine Sky focuses on the fertile period between 1600 and 1900 that…  •  Continue reading this entry.

After last week’s launch, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has now settled into orbit around the Moon. A USGS press release points out the cartographic aspects of the LRO’s mission: “Among the instruments carried on LRO, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera…  •  Continue reading this entry.

More reviews of books previously mentioned here: Directions reviews GIS Cartography: A Guide to Effective Map Design (see previous entry). The New York Times reviews The Selected Works of T. S. Spivet, a copy of which I now have and…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Yesterday’s Astronomy Picture of the Day featured a portion of the Dunhuang Star Chart, “one of the most impressive documents in the history of astronomy.” A four-metre scroll dating from the seventh century Tang Dynasty, it’s apparently the first…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Tony Flanders continues his critique of light-pollution maps; this time, he notes that the brightnesses of the respective colours are misleading: “the orange zone appears distinctly darker than the green zone, belying the fact that skies are in fact…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Sky and Telescope’s Tony Flanders decides to test the veracity of light-pollution maps. “They’re based on satellite data collected more than a decade ago, over a long timespan, in varying conditions, and massaged by an experimental mathematical model of…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Further to this morning’s post: it’s called Sky Map, and it’s for mobile phones running Google’s Android operating system….  •  Continue reading this entry.

The Sunday Times reports on an upcoming (“as early as this week”) astronomy application for mobile phones: “The Google software, called Star Droid, uses GPS technology found in most new handsets to identify the position of the user and then…  •  Continue reading this entry.

It may surprise you that GPS gets used a lot in amateur astronomy, which in recent years has gotten awfully computerized. Now, you might not think that a technology that locates where you are on Earth has a lot to…  •  Continue reading this entry.

I really shouldn’t be surprised by the number of lunar and star map applications for the iPod and iPhone touch that are aimed at amateur astronomers: I already have to bring a lot of gear out to the field as…  •  Continue reading this entry.

If you’re interested in buying a globe of a world not the Earth, you have three options available. The Moon Replogle makes a 12-inch globe of the Moon that is touted as being NASA-approved. It rests on a clear plastic…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The Six-Degree Field Galaxy Survey has released a map showing the position and clustering patterns of more than 100,000 nearby galaxies — of course, by “nearby,” they mean “within two billion light years.” The map, which covers 80 percent…  •  Continue reading this entry.

I frequently post entries about mapping the other planets and moons in our solar system not just because I’m nuts about astronomy (though I am), but also because this is where maps of new places are coming from. Our own…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Triton, the largest moon of Neptune, was visited for the first and only time on August 25 and 26, 1989, when Voyager 2 hurtled past it. Since then, any maps of that moon were based on images taken from…  •  Continue reading this entry.

A flurry of announcements last week related to Silverlight, Microsoft’s rich media browser plugin. Some will be of interest largely to geospatial professionals or web developers, like the public beta of the ArcGIS API for Silverlight or the Virtual Earth…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Topographic maps of Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, have been created from stereo pairs of radar images obtained by the Cassini probe. “The new flyover maps show, for the first time, the 3-D topography and height of the 1,200-meter (4,000-foot)…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Like its historical imagery, Google Earth 5.0’s Mars features have been updated not very long after the launch of Google Earth 5.0. In addition to layers showing historical maps of Mars (like Schiaparelli’s) and narrated guided tours (that really do…  •  Continue reading this entry.

What geotagging is to ordinary photography, astrotagging is to astrophotography — embedding machine-readable data that identifies the location of a photo. But astrophotography is harder: orientation, field of view and pixel scale come into play if you want to map…  •  Continue reading this entry.

A review on astronomy enthusiast site Cloudy Nights of the new Cambridge Double Star Atlas, which, unlike the Cambridge Star Atlas itself (reviewed last month), is coil-bound rather than hardcover. The reviewer, a double star observer, compares its usefulness…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Emily on the Planetary Society Blog: “Planetary cartographer Phil Stooke has been working on a cool project to compose and compare maps of Mars that show how we saw the planet throughout the Space Age.” It is very cool. The…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Astronomy reports on Return to the Moon, a short film designed for the Science on a Sphere platform (see previous entry): “‘Return to the Moon’ takes imagery and data sets from the Apollo, Clementine, and other missions and projects them…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Sky and Telescope’s Pocket Sky Atlas by Roger W. Sinnott Sky Publishing, 2006. Coilbound, 124 pp. ISBN 1-931559-31-7 The Cambridge Star Atlas, Third Edition by Wil Tirion Cambridge University Press, 2001. Hardcover, 96 pp. ISBN 0-521-800846 Rod Mollise’s recent look…  •  Continue reading this entry.

I’ve been meaning to do a review of the star atlases and books about star charts I have in my possession. Until I get around to doing that, please read this post by Rod Mollise — “Uncle Rod” — which…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Google Earth 5.0 was released today, with a bunch of new features. The ocean layers were not unexpected: ocean floor bathymetry was released a couple of weeks ago (see Stefan’s critique), and the previously announced presence of Sylvia Earle…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The story of how National Geographic’s iconic 1969 map of the Moon — the first complete map of the Moon — was made is recounted, with considerable digression, by retired cartographer Richard Furno, who worked on the project, on…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Englishman Thomas Harriot may have beaten Galileo to the punch. According to an article in February’s Astronomy and Geophysics, Harriot may have been the first known person to observe the Moon through a telescope — and, more importantly for us…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Samuel Arbesman has done a map of the Milky Way in the style of Harry Beck’s London Underground map. “I have attempted to actually make this map as accurate as possible, where each line corresponds to an arm of…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The New York Times profiles Dr. Robert W. Gaskell, who is working on producing topographic maps of various planets and moons of the solar system. Just now Dr. Gaskell is mapping all of Mercury and eight moons of Saturn. He…  •  Continue reading this entry.

MARTIAN — “MARs Tools for Interactive ANalysis” — depicts a number of layers relating to Martian geology — or rather, areology — via the Google Maps — or rather, Google Mars — API. Via Google Maps Mania. Previously: Topo…  •  Continue reading this entry.

From a cartographic perspective, the problem with Mars’s two tiny moons, Phobos and Deimos, is that they are not in the least bit spherical or even spheroidal — they are quite bumpy and irregular. If you thought map projections…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Frans Blok has been imagining maps of a future, terraformed Mars. He writes, “Almost ten years ago I made this map of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars. Recently I created a more sophisticated visualisation of a terraformed Mars, although no…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Nausicaa Delmotte has maps of the world’s astronomical observatories: plotted on Google Maps or in KML or plotted on a static world map. Via La Cartoteca….  •  Continue reading this entry.

Cassini’s imaging team has released an atlas of Saturn’s moon Dione. The atlas is available as a set of 15 PDF files at a scale of 1:1,000,000. Via Bad Astronomy and Universe Today. This is the third atlas of…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Ogle Earth’s Stefan Geens, normally a (fellow) Mac user, borrows a Windows machine for his in-depth review of WorldWide Telescope: “My initial impression stands: WWT is a wonderful piece of software that excels at rendering Earth’s view of the universe…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Apparently, “by the end of the month” means something a little sooner — i.e., right now: WorldWide Telescope is now available for download. See coverage from Astronomy, Sky and Telescope and Virtual Earth, an Evangelist’s Blog. It’s a beta (probably…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Digital Earth Blog notes reports that Microsoft’s WorldWide Telescope may be released by the end of this month — or at least Bill Gates has been quoted saying that it will. I’ll be very interested to know the system requirements….  •  Continue reading this entry.

Astronomers have produced the first map of a planet outside the solar system. The resolution is admittedly low — all we know is that there’s a “hot spot” offset from the planetary noon by some thirty degrees — but what…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Until Mariner 4 photographed craters on Mars in 1965, Earth-bound telescopes were the only way to map the red planet. BibliOdyssey looks at Schiaparelli’s 19th-century maps of Mars, which gave rise to the idea that canals — canali or…  •  Continue reading this entry.

JAXA, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, has announced a lunar map generated by the Kaguya (Selene) probe: “Using the Laser Altimeter (LALT) aboard the Lunar Explorer KAGUYA, JAXA acquired data covering the entire Moon’s surface and produced a topographical…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The Planetary Society Blog reports: On Monday, with no fanfare, JPL posted the first detailed topographic map of part of Titan. I suppose the map doesn’t strictly qualify as a pretty picture, but it is a tremendously important data…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The Planetary Society’s blog reports that the International Astronomical Union has approved new names for features on Saturn’s moon Dione, and provides an equatorial map with the new names added to spaceprobe imagery. But what also caught my attention…  •  Continue reading this entry.

I suppose a web-based standalone version of Google Sky was inevitable, once the Google Maps API supported it, and now it’s here. Highlights include infrared, microwave and historical-map layers with opacity controls and a series of image collections from…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Mike Pegg notes that despite the fact that it’s been a few months since the Google Maps API supported Moon, Mars and Sky, “we have not been inundated with Google Maps mash-ups that have taken advantage of these new astronomical…  •  Continue reading this entry.

To begin with, here is the video of the TED talk introducing WorldWide Telescope: Reactions, many of which make explicit comparisons to Google Sky: Bad Astronomy: “This does look very cool. It’s much like Google Sky, but from Microsoft’s direction….  •  Continue reading this entry.

The Moon’s polar regions are not easily observed from the Earth (or from non-polar Lunar orbit), but NASA has obtained high-resolution radar maps of the Moon’s south pole by using the Goldstone Solar System Radar in the Mojave Desert. The…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Microsoft gave a demonstration today of its forthcoming WorldWide Telescope application, the site for which is now online, but we still don’t have very much hard information about it. A lot of reactions. Robert Scoble, who when he saw a…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Since, as you know, I’m deeply interested in the mapping of the other planets and moons of the solar system, I was very much interested in two recent posts by Peter Minton, in which he takes Cassini imagery of…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Microsoft will be launching a competitor to Google Earth’s Sky feature, called “WorldWide Telescope,” on February 27, TechCrunch reports. The downloadable desktop software is claimed to be “significantly better” than either Google Earth or Stellarium in terms of data and…  •  Continue reading this entry.

A contractor is suing Google for allegedly stealing the idea for Google Earth’s Sky feature. Stefan argues that the lawsuit is “demonstrably frivolous,” citing evidence that the contractor was not the first person to moot the idea. From my perspective,…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The Festival of Maps continues to ripple through the media: yesterday’s New York Times carried a review of the Adler Planetarium in Chicago, focusing on the remarkable Atwood sphere, which predated more modern planetarium projectors, and the Mapping the Universe…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Light pollution is the bane of astronomers worldwide. Cities generate so much light that their glow can be seen from great distances; that sky glow interferes with astronomical observations, reducing what can be seen, both with the naked eye and…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The Cassini-Huygens mission’s map of Iapetus — one of Saturn’s moons — has been updated to reflect the exciting (to us astronomy geeks) images taken during Cassini’s flyby of the moon last September. (Image credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute.) Via…  •  Continue reading this entry.

I still find the Google Sky interface less appealing than some dedicated planetarium software I’ve tried, but I’m still interested in the most recent updates, including, among other things, imagery from space-based telescopes and imagery layers from 17th-century celestial…  •  Continue reading this entry.

It wasn’t so long ago that our world maps had parts that were either left empty or left to conjecture. “Here be dragons.” We haven’t had to worry about unmapped, unknown parts of the Earth — terra incognita — for…  •  Continue reading this entry.

One of the most common questions from beginning amateur astronomers is whether you can see the Apollo landing sites on the moon through a telescope. You can’t. You can, however, see detailed layers for the Apollo moon missions on Google…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Google Earth 4.2 was released overnight. Perhaps you’ve heard about one of its new features — and I don’t mean support for KML 2.2. Sky in Google Earth: click on the Sky button and the program transforms itself from an…  •  Continue reading this entry.

If you also like satellite images of other planets, proceed immediately to the home page of the HiRISE camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter: “During its mission, HiRISE will collect thousands of images of the Martian surface, covering only…  •  Continue reading this entry.

It’s a bit presumptuous to call them “hiker’s maps,” as the European Space Agency does in its announcement, but the Mars Express scientists have generated several sample topographic maps of the Iani Chaos region of Mars, in an exercise…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Much book-related news has been accumulating over here; past time I shared it. Surveying, Mapping and GIS reviews Dava Sobel’s Longitude, a book about John Harrison, who discovered how to determine longitude. I think I need to read this book….  •  Continue reading this entry.

Highlights of this page about the collection of the U.S. Naval Observatory include scans from several celestial atlases, including Bayer’s Uranometria (1661), Flamsteed’s Atlas céleste (1774), and Jamieson’s Celestial Atlas (1822). Via MetaFilter….  •  Continue reading this entry.

Edward Emerson Barnard’s posthumous 1927 work, A Photographic Atlas of Selected Regions of the Milky Way, has been digitized in its entirety and put on the web by Georgia Tech; here is the web site. Browsable by region and searchable;…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Images of Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, taken by the Huygens probe during its descent through Titan’s atmosphere last year, have been released. Mercator projection and stereographic versions have also been made, which makes them maps of a sort. More…  •  Continue reading this entry.

If you’re interested in antique celestial atlases, you’ll want to bookmark Historical Celestial Atlases on the Web, which provides links to a number of online reproductions of old star atlases. Via La Cartoteca. See previous entries: The Face of the…  •  Continue reading this entry.

NASA has released maps of Jupiter based on images taken by the Cassini-Huygens probe as it passed by the planet in 2000. Cylindrical and north and south polar projections are available. More from the BBC. Via Slashgeo and La…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Google Mars: in the same vein as Google Moon (see previous entry); with visual-spectrum, infrared and elevation imagery. Here’s Google’s FAQ. Via Cartography, amongst many others. (Update: Announcement on the Google Blog.) Also, as Stefan notes, a Mars layer is…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Via La Cartoteca, I discover images and maps from the USGS’s Astrogeology Research Program: a collection of imagery, GIS data, and map products (e.g., globes for sale) for other planets and moons from our Solar System….  •  Continue reading this entry.

The big news this week for Google watchers this week is the announcement Wednesday of a memorandum of understanding between Google and NASA’s Ames Research Center. Press releases from ARC and Google; news coverage from the San Jose Mercury News…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The Full Moon Atlas: “A complete series of interactive lunar maps, with more than 2,500 geographic formations (including craters, mountains, lakes, seas and valleys) identified simply by moving your mouse cursor over the feature.” Javascript required; doesn’t work properly in…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Using the Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers have generated a colour map of Pluto; it’s a bit of a stretch to call the map “detailed,” but on the other hand it’s rather amazing to have any detail on a map of…  •  Continue reading this entry.

In honour of the 36th anniversary of the first moon landing, Google Moon, with a Google Maps interface, NASA imagery, the Apollo landing sites, and a fun gag at maximum zoom (Boing Boing, Google Blog, MetaFilter)….  •  Continue reading this entry.

Here are two sky charts that track the path of Comet Machholz, which will be visible to the naked eye for the next couple of months. Via MetaFilter….  •  Continue reading this entry.

Also via Here Be Dragons, another fine digital collection of lunar maps, from the Lunar and Planetary Institute. These maps were made by the USAF in the 1960s — back when the U.S. government had a vested interest in accurate…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Virtual Moon Atlas is free lunar atlas software for Windows; certain functions appear to require OpenGL support (via the Astronomy tribe)….  •  Continue reading this entry.

The Cartoonist has discovered the Linda Hall Library of Science, Engineering and Technology in Kansas City, which has quite a bit of stuff on celestial mapping. In addition to an exhibition of rare books and maps called The Face of…  •  Continue reading this entry.

These logarithmic maps of the universe measure the distance from the Earth’s core to absolutely everything, from kilometres to megaparsecs, from the mantle to the microwave background of the universe (via Cartographie tribe)….  •  Continue reading this entry.

Lunar Atlases brings together a couple of atlases of the moon and other lunar photography. The atlases are comprised of photographs taken by lunar orbiters rather than traditional atlas maps. The photos are sorted by feature and coordinates, though. Via…  •  Continue reading this entry.