NACIS reports that, once again, videos of the presentations made at this year’s annual meeting in Minneapolis, which took place last week, have been uploaded to the society’s YouTube channel. The playlist is here.
Author: Jonathan Crowe
Jonathan Crowe blogs about maps at The Map Room. His essays and reviews have been published by AE, Calafia, The New York Review of Science Fiction, the Ottawa Citizen, Strange Horizons and Tor.com. He lives in Shawville, Quebec.
Starlink as GPS Alternative
The point of SpaceX’s Starlink constellation, consisting of some 3,000 low-orbiting satellites (so far), is to provide broadband internet access. But it could also be used as an alternative to GPS that might be less susceptible to jamming or spoofing. The U.S. Army and a team at the University of Texas at Austin were interested in the idea, but SpaceX told them to go pound sand in 2020. Now said UT team has gone and reverse-engineered the Starlink signal to pinpoint a location to within 30 metres. Not as good as GPS, obviously, but the researchers say that a software update—and SpaceX’s cooperation—could get that accuracy down to within a metre. Their (non-peer-reviewed) paper is here. Coverage: El Reg, TechCrunch.
Tracking the Russian Invasion of Ukraine with Satellite Imagery
Bloomberg’s MapLab newsletter looks at how freely available satellite imagery has enabled widespread monitoring of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
When the invasion of Ukraine started, these images started popping up on social media and in the news so often that it seems like most of us have access to advanced satellite imagery intelligence in real time. […] But the role of commercial providers in acquiring and sharing so many images with such regularity is unprecedented. Their rise has made military-grade intelligence available to pretty much everyone who wishes to look into it.
What’s notable is that because the satellites are commercial, the images aren’t classified.
The Tellurometer, with a Girl to Help
To start off your weekend, here’s a 1961 clip from British Pathé depicting the surveying and mapmaking technologies of the era. [Massimo]
Eduard, a New Mac-only Relief Shading App
Launching at NACIS, which is next week, but available on the Mac App Store now, Eduard is a Mac-only application that generates relief maps by “[using] machine learning to match the aesthetics and details of relief shadings created by Swiss cartographers.” (The name is a pretty obvious reference to Eduard Imhof.) The app allows you to adjust direction of illumination, aerial perspective and detail, and works with digital elevation models and a number of file formats. The launch price is US$69.99 (C$99.99) until the 23rd, after which I presume the price will go up.
More on Tactile Maps
The Bodleian Map Room Blog (no relation) has a nice look at some tactile maps for the visually impaired, with some interesting 20th-century examples of the form, such as 3D relief maps, a globe, and braille maps.
Previously: Tactile Maps, Modern and Historical; A 19th-Century Tactile Map.
New Apple Watch Features Include Dual-Frequency GPS, Virtual Breadcrumbs
Apple is touting the Apple Watch Ultra’s dual-frequency GPS support, viz., it uses the GPS L5 band in addition to L1 to improve accuracy. The new L5 signal is higher power and is supposed to provide more robust service, but with only 17 satellites broadcasting on it it’s not yet fully operational. Still, a Reddit user was able to document the improved accuracy by conducting an unexpected stress test: mowing the lawn. With the Ultra the mowing rows can be made out, whereas the tracks made with a series 4 watch were all over the place. [9to5Mac]
While the Ultra is the only Apple Watch that can use the L5 band, watchOS 9 adds a redesigned Compass app and a Backtrack feature that lets users retrace their steps using on-the-fly waypoints and GPS traces. MacRumors has a tutorial. This is something I’m looking forward to trying out: my series 8 watch arrived last week.
Yale’s Work on Map Forgeries
As the keepers of the Vinland Map, the folks at Yale’s Beinecke Library might be expected to have a few thoughts about map forgeries, seeing as the Vinland Map is arguably the best known example. In an article posted to the Beinecke Library website last July, Raymond Clemens discusses the work of Yale’s Institute for the Preservation of Cultural Heritage to determine the Vinland Map’s inauthenticity, and detecting map forgeries in general. Yale seems to be making a point of studying map forgeries, to the point of adding known forgeries to their collections.
Unfinished London: History of the Tube Map
Jay Foreman’s look at the history of London’s Tube map is presented as part of his Unfinished London series, rather than as an episode of Map Men, of which he is half, so it’s in a slightly different mode. Slightly. It’s also just the first part.
India Pushing Phone Makers to Adopt NavIC
Reuters reports that the Indian government is pushing mobile phone makers to include support for NavIC, the Indian-government owned satellite navigation system. (At the moment NavIC provides regional coverage from a seven-satellite constellation, but the plan is for 24-satellite global coverage.) Phone makers are resisting the request, citing the additional chips and cost required to support the system. And there’s the matter of redundancy: the current iPhone, for example, already supports BeiDou, Galileo, GLONASS and QZSS in addition to GPS. [9to5Mac]
The Mediterranean’s Summer Heat Wave
Europe’s summer heat wave wasn’t just felt on land; the Mediterranean Sea saw surface temperatures as much as 5°C above the average. The ESA’s animated map, above, shows the difference between sea surface temperatures from March to August 2022 and the 1985-2005 average for those months. The redder, the hotter than average. [ESA]
From Analemma to Zodiac: Bellerby’s Glossary of Globe Terminology
Globemaker Bellerby & Co. has posted a glossary of globe terminology that covers more general geographical terms and concepts (equator, hemisphere) as well as things that are mainly found on globes, covering the various mount types, to common features like time dials and analemmas, to calottes (which are the little circles that cover the poles, where the gore points meet; oddly enough “gore” doesn’t get its own listing).
Audubon’s Bird Migration Explorer
Audubon’s Bird Migration Explorer is the mother of all bird migration maps, with information on the seasonal ranges and migration routes of some 458 bird species in North America.
Previously: Animated Map of Bird Migration.
Wildfire Aware
Wildfire Aware is an interactive map of wildfires in the United States that lists fires by the number of personnel fighting them. Selecting a fire brings up a lot more information, drawn on 22 layers from Esri’s ArcGIS Living Atlas of the World. [ArcGIS Blog]
A New Map for The Wheel of Time
While researching his forthcoming book, Origins of the Wheel of Time (Tor, Nov 2022), Michael Livingston discovered that a map published in a 1997 guide to the Wheel of Time universe—which unlike the maps in the Robert Jordan novels showed the entire world—was, in the opinion of Jordan himself, wrong: according to notes Livingston discovered in the author’s archives, one continent was misnamed and another was too small (see above left). With the permission of the estate, Livingston worked with map artist Ellisa Mitchell—who drew the original map for The Eye of the World—to create a new map of the Wheel of Time world that reflected the author’s intent (see above right). Details, and closeup looks at the maps, at Livingston’s Tor.com article.