Fall Colors From Space

October 11 and 12 were clear days across most of the Great Lakes and Northeast, and the NASA Earth Observatory has highlighted some satellite imagery from those days showing the fall color change:

Fall Color Arrives in the U.S. and Canada

The images come from the MODIS instrument on board the Terra and Aqua satellites.  Terra and Aqua are in sun-synchronous orbits and together they image every location on Earth at least once every two days.

MODIS captures over 36 spectral bands and has many scientific applications, but the reason I like MODIS imagery is that it provides a low-resolution, visible spectrum image of any location and updates very often.  This means you can see what any particular spot on Earth would look like from orbit with your own eyes, every couple of days.

The NASA EOSDIS Worldview page lets you view Terra and Aqua MODIS imagery in very nearly real-time.  It even lets you export geo-referenced imagery, like this one I saved of the Terra imagery from today:

Alongways

I came across a webpage/cell phone app the last week that I've found incredibly useful:

Alongways.

I'm sure most of us are familiar with using services like Google Maps to find the closest locations of particular types of things, whether you're looking for a particular restaurant, grocery store, gas station, etc.

And Google Maps is good at that - as long as you are looking for the closest example to where you are located at that moment.

But more often, I would much rather know what the most convenient locations are along a route that I need to travel.  If I am driving from Akron to Fremont to Columbus to Akron, it may be more helpful to know where a post office is along that route, rather than which one is closest to my current location.

That's where Alongways comes in - you enter your beginning and ending points, and then search for a particular thing along that route.  It will suggest the most convenient examples along that route (it will cast a slightly wider net over a longer route).

I've been really happy with the results so far.  The webpage is free, and there is an app available for Android or iOS for $1:

http://alongways.com/
 

Old Maps Online

I recently came across a great website for browsing or viewing old maps, the aptly named Old Maps Online.

Old Maps Online is a collaboration between The Great Britain Historical GIS Project based at The University of Portsmouth, UK and Klokan Technologies GmbH, Switzerland, and despite its European origins, has an incredible wealth of old maps worldwide.

When you first navigate to the site it will automatically take you to your detected location.  Many of the maps are available in very high resolution.

At the moment I'm particularly enjoying this map of the Connecticut Western Reserve from 1833.