Thursday, October 20, 2016

Mapping Human Colonies on Mars


Recently National Geographic has started using Leaflet.js to provide interactive versions of the beautiful supplemental posters issued with each months National Geographic magazine. The September poster, exploring life in the Pacific Ocean off British Columbia, is available to view in the British Columbia Supplement.

The October print edition of the National Geographic includes a double sided poster about Colonizing Mars. The art side of the poster depicts a possible human colony on the red planet. It explains some of the technical difficulties which would be faced in establishing a Mars colony and shows what such a colony might look like.

The map side of the poster is a new map of Mars based on imagery and data from NASA's most recent missions to the planet. If you are interested in maps of Mars you might also enjoy National Geographic's article on the history of mapping the planet, What Mars Maps Got Right (and Wrong) Through Time.

If you want to create your own interactive map from an illustration, photo or other still image then you might find Zoomable Images with Leaflet helpful. This tutorial explains how you can use GDAL2Tiles and MapTiler to render map tiles from an image. If you have a Zoomify account Showing Zoomify Images with Leaflet explains how you can create an interactive Leaflet map from your Zoomify images.

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