The Maps of the Week

Inside Asia Tours has produced three very impressive custom designed interactive maps showcasing some of the wonderful destinations that can be visited in Burma, Japan and in Vietnam, Cambodia & Laos.

Each of the three custom designed maps feature some wonderful touches, such as animated boats and sea monsters. The custom map marker icons also include small animations and unfurling scrolls which reveal the place labels.when you mouse-over a marker.

If you select a marker on the map you can then explore the chosen tourist destination using Google Maps panoramic Street View. imagery. The only thing really missing from Inside Asia is some background information on the featured locations. It would be nice if the Street View scenes also included a little information about the selected destination.


Between 2011 and 2015 NASA's MESSENGER spacecraft orbited Mercury, studying the planet's chemical composition, geology, and magnetic field.

Melown's 3d Map of Mercury uses imagery collected by Messenger to provide an interactive 3d globe of the planet. The map includes four different imagery layers: natural color, morphology, false color and enhanced color.

The map itself was created with Melown's new 3d mapping library. Melown are currently accepting applications from developers who wish to alpha test the new Melown Map API.


This week a team of researchers, led by Fabio Falchi, published The New World Atlas of Artificial Night Sky Brightness. This new atlas shows light pollution around the world, with light pollution rated as a ratio to natural sky brightness, measured at around 1 a.m..

The scientific paper accompanying the new atlas explains how the team measures light pollution and explores in more depth which populations around the world are most and least affected by light pollution. However, if you want to explore The New World Atlas of Artificial Sky Brightness for yourself, you can view an interactive version of the map created by the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences.

CIRES has created both an interactive map and an interactive 3D Globe from the new light pollution atlas and says that it will also soon release a KMZ data file for noncommercial use.