Today's Fresh Blogs...

• Downloadable Large-Format Historical Maps

  Published: August 31, 2007, 10:56 am

  Tags: Cartography, Topographic Maps

  that have historic older maps available for online viewing (I’ll list a few of these in an upcoming post), but these sites typically don’t have the maps in high-resolution downloadable formats. You can always zoom in to the highest resolution, do a screen capture, then mosaic the images together [...]

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• Google Earth Index For US Army Map Service Topographic And City Maps

  Published: September 19, 2007, 11:19 am

  Tags: Topographic Maps, Google Earth

  downloadable historical maps, I noted that the Perry-Castaneda Map Library has an interesting digital collection of Army Map Service topographic maps dating from the 1940s and 1950s, covering large areas of Asia and Africa, along with city maps for Japan, China, Korea and Taiwan (Formosa). Over on the Google [...]

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• Goofing Around With Pan-sharpening

  Published: September 20, 2007, 10:37 am

  Tags: Microdem, Gis, Topographic Maps

  Orbiting satellites often have two types of digital imaging sensors: - Multispectral, i.e. different sensors for different colors (including IR), or different filters in front of the same sensor. Each individual band can be shown as a black-and-white image; multiple bands can each be assigned a color, and combined to form an RGB color image. -

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• Recoloring Or Modifying GeoTiff Images

  Published: December 6, 2007, 9:22 am

  Tags: Gis, Cartography, Topographic Maps

  I’ve been posting about various ways to extract and embed geographic metadata from GeoTiffs, image files that have coordinate information in them that can be used by GIS software to georeference the image, i.e. assigning a geographic location to each pixel. Here’s an example of how extracting geographic metadata (like a worldfile)

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• Full Index Of 1:250K US Army Topographic Maps

  Published: January 28, 2008, 11:47 am

  Tags: Google Earth, Kml, Topographic Maps

  An earlier post featured a Google Earth KML file by Price Collins that indexed US Army topographic maps (1:250K) downloadable from the Perry-Castaneda Map library. At that time, 435 city maps and 413 1:250K quadrangles had been indexed, with each indexed map reference in the KML file containing a download link to the original map [...]

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• Downloadable Updated NOAA Raster Navigation Charts

  Published: February 5, 2008, 11:18 am

  Tags: Cartography, Data, Topographic Maps

  NOAA’s Office Of Coast Survey has downloadable copies of regularly-updated RNCs (Raster Navigation Charts). The updated charts are in BSB format, not supported by many GIS and graphic software programs, but there’s a list of links to free and demo software packages capable of displaying BSB files in georeferenced format (like

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• Reproject NOAA BSB Raster Navigation Charts And Export Them In TIFF Format

  Published: February 6, 2008, 9:36 am

  Tags: Esri, Cartography, Coordinate Conversion, Data, Topographic Maps

  Yesterday, I posted about a NOAA site where you can download Raster Navigation Charts (RNC), maps of coastal and inland waterways. The charts are currently only available in BSB format, which many GIS programs can’t handle; I linked to a few free viewers that will let you view the maps, but not export them. They’re [...]

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• Topographic Map Symbols for Historic Topographic Maps

  Published: March 5, 2008, 2:55 pm

  Tags: Topographic Maps

  Via The Map Room, a key to (mostly) obsolete symbols found on US topographic maps dating from the 1890s to 1920s. Creative Commons license, so they’re freely usable as long as you link back to the page.

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• Worldwide Contour Lines In Google Maps' Terrain View

  Published: April 2, 2008, 7:44 pm

  Tags: Google Maps, Topographic Maps

  announced the addition of topographic contour lines to their Terrain view in Google Maps. It’s for the entire world, so I suspect they’re using SRTM 90-meter resolution data; not ideal, but not bad, either. Here’s Popocatepetl, just SE of Ciudad de Mexico: You have to zoom in to at least the 1-mile / [...]

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• New GeoPDF Features

  Published: April 8, 2008, 12:39 pm

  Tags: Kml, Data, Topographic Maps

  point on Google Maps A lot more coordinate systems supported, including MGRS, Lambert Conformal Conic, Mercator, etc. Import and display shapefiles, re-projecting them on-the-fly Import [...]

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• AZ Garmin Topo Maps And More From The GPS File Depot

  Published: April 15, 2008, 1:06 pm

  Tags: Gps, Gpx, Garmin, Coordinate Conversion, Topographic Maps

  in: 1:24K-equivalent Garmin topographic maps for all of Arizona (with all the bugs fixed). Looks like the process has been automated (at least partially), [...]

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• Make Your Own Topo Maps For A Garmin GPS Unit

  Published: August 5, 2008, 8:10 am

  Tags: Gis, Gps, Garmin, Topographic Maps

  Well, the good news is that Garmin is finally starting to offer 1:24K scale US topographic maps for some of their GPS units. While they’ve had these maps for US National Parks in the East, Central and West for quite a while, they’re now issuing them for the US as a whole. These are different [...]

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