Maps

This week saw the 70th anniversary of the World War II Dambuster raids. On 16–17 May 1943 an attack on German dams, carried out by Royal Air Force No. 617 Squadron, subsequently known as the "Dambusters", used a specially developed "bouncing bomb" invented and developed by Barnes Wallis. The BBC has put together an interactive map that retraces the mission. The interactive uses a hand-drawn map from the official June 1943 British Air Ministry report on the Dambusters raid. The map shows the routes taken by the planes, the location of the planes that crashed and the location of the German dams. The MapBox Blog has this week been showing off the power of their MapBox Streets with vector tiles. Using vector tiles ensures the speed and scalability of MapBox maps. It also allows for some amazing styling of the map tiles. Using MapBox anyone can make "a totally custom branded map, of the entire globe, that is lighting fast on every device." The blog post includes a number of beautiful examples of styled maps. I think my favourite is the hand-drawn map style (shown in the screenshot above).

FlyfotoArkivet LW1944 is a Google Map of Denmark overlaid with historical aerial imagery of the country taken by the Luftwaffe, under occupation, in 1944. Just over 75% of the country is covered by this collection of historical aerial photographs; including Copenhagen, Aarhus and Odense. Other Historical Aerial Photo Maps The New Jersey State Atlas - aerial photography of the entire state taken in the 1930's Neighborhood Change in Connecticut - aerial photos from 1934 Catbus - 1947 aerial imagery of Montreal Old Maps of Moscow - a large collection of historical maps & aerial imagery from the 1940's Other Collections of Aerial Imagery The Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland has one of the world's largest collections of historical aerial photographs. The WWII Aerial Photos and Maps website has a large collection of Aerial photos taken during the Second World War.

Ubilabs have been testing out the new look base map layer that is now available in the Google Maps API. They have created a simple demo that allows you to compare the new look that is available if you add google.maps.visualRefresh to your code. If you mouse-over the demo map you can switch between the old and new designs. So far Ubilabs have confirmed the following design changes in the new base map and map controls: No shadows for markers Markers are slightly bigger Simplified InfoWindow Smaller MapType toggle Smaller Google logo (bottom left) Smaller TOS bar (bottom right) Tweaked zoom slider Saturated map color State borders show up in higher zoom level Buildings show up in higher zoom level Icons for all POI places in a small circle Major streets in cities are desaturated New font (Roboto) used in InfoWindow New colors for directions (route & markers) Some area labels are light grey Mapperz has also been playing with the new design. He created this JSFiddle page so you can play around with the code yourself and check out how things look with the new Google Maps design.

Have you ever wondered what the 19th century version of Street View would like? No. Well I've found out anyway. Today I was rummaging around in the back of the internet's attic and came across this early prototype of Street View from 1876. Vintage Street View is an album of some of the oldest ever Street Views. You can view the album in any browser you like but you won't get the full sepia effect unless you view the album in Chrome. If that inspires you to take an even deeper look into the past then why not have a peak at There and Then as well. There and Then is a collection of historic vintage movies superimposed on top of the same view as seen now in Google Maps Street View.

During and after the Spanish Civil War General Franco created 541 forced labour battalions. Frankismoan Preso Batailoiei is a Google Map showing where Franco's forced labour battalions were put to work in the Basque region of Spain. The map shows the locations where prisoners were used as slave labour to build roads, work in factories and /or on other construction projects. If you click on a map marker the information window provides details on the type of work the prisoners were forced to undertake, the number of prison staff and the dates of each forced labour project. The map is in the Basque language.

Last September we showed you the first set of amazing underwater Street View images that Google had released.  They were absolutely stunning, as you can see in the example here: TechCrunch recently spoke with Google about their Ocean Street View program, and came away with some amazing insights, including: …the cameras his team uses for this project are very different from those used by Google’s other Street View vehicles. The team had to use wider-angle lenses, for example. Google’s underwater Street View camera has three cameras on its front and takes images every three seconds. One of the cameras points downward, because that’s how images during reef surveys have traditionally been taken. The back of the scooter features a tablet that can control the cameras. During a typical dive, the divers cover about 2km and take 3,000 to 4,000 images per camera, and the team does three dives per day, each of which lasts about an hour. In total, the team has taken about 150,000 images so far, and Vevers expects this number to grow exponentially over the next few months. In the long run, the team hopes to create diver-less systems that can stay underwater for 12 hours or more. The technology is already available, but it needs to be adapted to the kind of camera system needed for Street View. The systems cost around $50,000 each, and they’re already testing 3D cameras to begin to capture that kind of imagery soon. It’s quite an amazing article, and it offers some great details into how this system works.  Check out the full article, then explore our previous post on underwater Street View to visit some of these areas for yourself. The post How underwater Street View works appeared first on Google Earth Blog.

I got my invite through today to connect to the new Google Maps. Colour me f**king impressed! By far and away the stand-out feature in the new Google Maps is the integration with Google Earth - and Google Maps users no longer need a plug-in to view Google Earth imagery in Google Maps. But so what? - With all due respects to my friends at the Google Earth Blog I've always thought that 3d maps are a bit of a sideshow when it comes to online maps. But what a sideshow it is! Google Maps now has real-time cloud overlays and, if you zoom out, it also has real-time sun, moon and star imagery! As I almost said before, colour me f**cking amazed. This imagery is of course stunning and will be important to a significant number of Google Maps users - but for most users it will still remain a sideshow. The majority of Google Maps users, in their day-to-day use of Google Maps, will be far more interested in the basics of finding locations, finding local businesses and getting directions. Well you know I am biased but there is simply no competition. Google's huge, no really - unbelievably huge - data of local businesses, public transit and nearly everyone's individual search patterns means that no other map provider can come close to offering anything close to the new Google Maps. Open Street Maps may have far better map data in many parts of the world, Waze may be able to provide far better direction data in many locations, and numerous sites might be able to offer you better local business reviews. However no other online map provider can give you anywhere near the whole package that is the new Google Maps. It simply delivers in nearly every department you want from an online map! Of course this review is just scratching at the surface. One of the big selling points of the new Google Maps is that every user gets their own map. Google Maps now responds to every user's favourite locations, search patterns and the behaviour of their friends on Google+. I have a feeling that this is going to freak out a few tech-savy users. However most users are simply just not going to notice that their map is tailored to their needs and the technophiles are probably going to love it anyway. Well I'm biased, I am a technophile, and I do love it!

The Nature Conservancy's Nature Rocks programme aims to make it easy for families to have fun in nature. To find great natural spaces to visit you can use the Nature Rocks Map. This Google Map allows users to search for nature locations by location and by type (e.g. hiking, swimming, fishing, parks, camp-grounds, zoos etc). After you enter a zip-code in the map search bar you can filter the results by distance and by the type of nature space that you are looking for. Each displayed location contains an address, a website link and a link to the location's Google+ page.

The Hatnote Wikipedia Recent Changes Map is a real-time map of live edits being made to Wikipedia by unregistered users. Unregistered users are far more likely to make incorrect, false or spam changes to Wikipedia. Only 15% of the contributions to English Wikipedia are from unregistered users. So the map actually represents only a small portion of the total edit activity on Wikipedia. The map reminds me of WikipediaVision, a Google Map of real-time map edits to Wikipedia. The map displays an information window for each edit, with the title of the article, the summary of the edit (if a summary was given), a link to the changes that were made to the article and the time the edit happened. Mapping Wikipedia is a project from TraceMedia and the Oxford Internet Institute.Using the Google Maps API Mapping Wikipedia allows you to view the geography of all geotagged Wikipedia articles in a number of different languages. It can also create maps based on the word count of articles, the date create

The Cassini team has released a global topographic map of Saturn's moon Titan. What makes this map interesting is the fact that, due to its thick atmosphere, Titan can only be mapped by radar during Cassini's close flybys. As a result, only half of its surface has been imaged, and only 11 percent has topography data. For this map, the remainder was, well, extrapolated: Lorenz's team used a mathematical process called splining -- effectively using smooth, curved surfaces to "join" the areas between grids of existing data. "You can take a spot where there is no data, look how close it is to the nearest data, and use various approaches of averaging and estimating to calculate your best guess," he said. "If you pick a point, and all the nearby points are high altitude, you'd need a special reason for thinking that point would be lower. We're mathematically papering over the gaps in our coverage." Topo maps of parts of Titan have been released before, but not for the entire moon. See previous posts on The Map R