Maps are cool!

Maps are cool!

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Published
December 25, 2023
Author
Ronny Coste

Maps

I love geography and maps!
So what better way to show my love and appreciation for them beside sharing the most interesting ones that I have found so far across the internet.

ISS Tracker with live camera

This page have to be one of the coolest one I have found so far! it is so amazing to see where the ISS is, what it is passing over, and see a live feed of what that looks like.

Princeton Vanderbei Gott Projection maps

Accurate representation of the earth in a 2D space. Great for illustrating the inaccuracies of the maps that we have grown to use and rely on while on high school and college but as the saying says “All maps are wrong”. Here is a poster about it by Johnny Harris and here is a Ted-ED video explaining it.

GPS jamming map

GPS jamming map of all the areas and places that it is jamming radio frequency that prevent from tracking flights live status. Usually Gov, and militaries do this to prevent civilian or spies from tracking, and knowing what is happening.

Building ages in the Netherlands

This map shows 3D renders of many building in the Netherlands and have then color coded to represent in which period this building were constructed and finished. Amazing!

Map showing Off-Shore wind farms of europe

Historical Topographic Map Explorer

This is by far one of the coolest maps I have seem so far. I love it so much that I might write a blog post about it, as this map uses historical data and modern data to show the differences between the start of the maps collected 1879 to modern maps from 2010 or even more recent ones. This collab between the USGS and ESRI is top notch.

Meshmap

Map that shows all the nodes that support the meshtastic network. Quite cool if interesting in RF, LoRa and Meshtastic.

KiwiSDR

This website lets you remotely manipulate a radio from a lot of places all over the world and learn about HAM radio.

AT&T Long Lines Map

This map shows the network of antennas that the US Gov built during the cold war as backup communications network that used microwaves.

WaterwayMap

A map that tries to document all of the waterways on our world!

Open Infrastructure Map

Interesting map showing the infrastructure of our world, It is mostly powerline and energy infrastructure. Really Cool!

NYC Subway Sheds

This is a pretty simple website it shows how far away your train station is from other train train stations. Great for people that live or are NYC curious.

Trains FYI

A live, real-time map of passenger train locations in the United States and Canada.

Flight Aware

A real time commercial flight tracker of all the passanger flights happening out there right now.

Globe ads Exchange

Globe ads uses the ads system that planes have to keep taps of each other give you a more advance view of all the flights happening now commercial, or not. It is a pretty powerful yet cool maps app.

Marine Traffic

Ships tracking website, the same as Globe ads but for ships. This website was amazing during the suez canal blockage in 2021? 2022? to see how that blockade stopped the world trade.

Old School Runescape Map

If you love runescape you would love this. Every game has their own cool website map but I am not trying to fill this website with only maps of the games that I have played. but here are a few other that I really enjoy :)

Tokyo 3D Maps with live trains tracking

3D map of Tokyo with real-time train data, CCTV of different busy Tokyo intersections among other things. Great to kind of see the scale of Tokyo from your computer.

Switzerland 3D Map

The swiss government went out of their way to map every single house and address in Switzerland in this 3D map… That is amazing and crazy and I love it!

The Opportunity Atlas

The opportunity Atlas shows how every zipcode affects the income level of some of those people that are being raised or were raised there. This could be because of lack of opportunities, failing infrastructure dis-investment on education poor housing among other things.

Geocaching game

This is a treasure game were you download an app and try to find the item that was hiding. simple and cool.

Language World Map

Simple map app. You input which languages you speak, the maps shows which countries have that language as one of the official languages.

Air Pollution Map

Air pollution tracker. The embed is setup for north America but this would work in any country that is supported on the map which is most of them.

WAYFINDER

See and track all of the LEO Satellite and all of the debris that we know of and are able to track.

History Maps

The history of different periods in history plus their maps.

Light Pollution Maps

Light pollution map. This is great for when I want to try to get some beautiful photos of the night sky and I want to prevent as much as possible the interference of human-made lights :)

ISS Interactive 3D Visualizations

Be in the ISS with the 3D model of it flying over the earth! Pretty dope.

Heavens Above

Wiggle

Map of all the different WiFi, Bluetooth, and Cellular connections that have been scanned and tracked on this website. Pretty cool and kind of scary at the same time.

APRS

Website for people into HAM Radio. This will locate different radio stations, radio antennas, and vehicles transmitting at the time.

Maps FM

Find places in the maps where people talked about and explain the history of that place. Awesome way to learn about the history of many places but mainly about the US for now hopefully it picks up in other parts of the globe.

My own plug!

I created this simple app to help track the places that I want to go, and have been with a little review about them and different icons to make it easy for me to find later!
 

Conclusion

While this might seem like a lot of different site there is still a lot more websites out there that I don’t know about, or that are not easily accessible.
Some honorable mentions for some other sites would be: