Nostr notes by Maps Mania (Unofficial)

The #30DayMapChallenge Begins Recently, I was very impressed by ...

2026-11-01T15:01:41Z

The #30DayMapChallenge Begins

Recently, I was very impressed by 10 Years, 10 Adventures, a collection of ten WebGL-powered animated travel maps featuring 3D terrain, animated elements and trip narration. So, for today's #30DayMapChallenge, I decided to try creating something similar: a 3D map of Cap d'Antibes, which I recently visited in the South of France.
My interactive 3D Map of Cap d’Antibes lets you fly around the peninsula, discover some of its best-known landmarks and view the route of an incredible coastal walk. The map includes clickable points of interest, with three photographs I took on my vacation. You can also follow an animated walking route along the coastal Sentier de Tirepoil, watching the route gradually draw itself across the 3D terrain.
The map was created using Three.js, with elevation data from Mapterhorn, a service providing terrain elevation data for creating 3D maps of the Earth's surface. The elevation data was downloaded as a GeoTIFF, a georeferenced image format which stores geographic information alongside the elevation values for each pixel. This data was then converted into a 3D terrain model.
The walking route was plotted separately using geojson.io, an online tool for creating and editing GeoJSON geographic data. The resulting LineString was added to the 3D terrain and animated, with its height adjusted to follow the contours of the landscape.
My map is not a patch on the maps in 10 Years, 10 Adventures, but I'm happy with the results so far. With a little vibe-coding help from ChatGPT, the map only took 3-4 hours to develop. I probably won't take the project much further, as I suspect the map isn't of much interest to anybody else. However, there are plenty of ways I could improve it, including adding more photographs and points of interest, incorporating additional walking routes, and perhaps even adding narration to turn it into a more complete virtual tour of the peninsula.
Read the original article at Maps Mania.
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http://googlemapsmania.blogspot.com/2026/11/the-30daymapchallenge-begins.html

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The #30DayMapChallenge Begins Recently, I was very impressed by ...

2026-11-01T14:24:54Z

The #30DayMapChallenge Begins

Recently, I was very impressed by 10 Years, 10 Adventures, a collection of ten WebGL-powered animated travel maps featuring 3D terrain, animated elements and trip narration. So, for today's #30DayMapChallenge, I decided to try creating something similar: a 3D map of Cap d'Antibes, which I recently visited in the South of France.
My interactive 3D Map of Cap d’Antibes lets you fly around the peninsula, discover some of its best-known landmarks and view the route of an incredible coastal walk. The map includes clickable points of interest, with three photographs I took on my vacation. You can also follow an animated walking route along the coastal Sentier de Tirepoil, watching the route gradually draw itself across the 3D terrain.
The map was created using Three.js, with elevation data from Mapterhorn, a service providing terrain elevation data for creating 3D maps of the Earth's surface. The elevation data was downloaded as a GeoTIFF, a georeferenced image format which stores geographic information alongside the elevation values for each pixel. This data was then converted into a 3D terrain model.
The walking route was plotted separately using geojson.io, an online tool for creating and editing GeoJSON geographic data. The resulting LineString was added to the 3D terrain and animated, with its height adjusted to follow the contours of the landscape.
My map is not a patch on the maps in 10 Years, 10 Adventures, but I'm happy with the results so far. With a little vibe-coding help from ChatGPT, the map only took 3-4 hours to develop. I probably won't take the project much further, as I suspect the map isn't of much interest to anybody else. However, there are plenty of ways I could improve it, including adding more photographs and points of interest, incorporating additional walking routes, and perhaps even adding narration to turn it into a more complete virtual tour of the peninsula.
Read the original article at Maps Mania.
Enjoyed this post? Follow @mapsmania on Bluesky.

https://googlemapsmania.blogspot.com/2026/11/the-30daymapchallenge-begins.html

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Famous Place Pictures in Japanese Art In the 1830s, Katsushika ...

2026-10-30T14:04:04Z

Famous Place Pictures in Japanese Art

In the 1830s, Katsushika Hokusai ignited a golden age of Japanese landscape art with his Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji. Capturing the topography, seasons, and human activity around Japan's sacred peak, Hokusai’s masterpiece inspired his contemporary, Utagawa Hiroshige, to create One Hundred Famous Views of Edo - a breathtaking visual survey of Japan’s bustling capital.
Both series belong to Ukiyo-e (浮世絵), "pictures of the floating world," a genre of Edo-period woodblock prints. More specifically, they elevated the sub-genre of Meisho-e (名所絵), or "famous place pictures." Fueled by a 19th-century domestic travel boom, these prints served as both fine art and geographical guides, cataloging iconic landmarks and scenic views for a public eager to explore.
Before single-sheet landscape prints exploded in popularity, publisher-cartographers created Meisho Ki (名所記) - bound, woodblock-printed travel guides that paired pictorial maps of major routes like the Tokaido highway with illustrated sights. Hokusai and Hiroshige were directly drawing on this established cartographic publishing tradition.
Hiroshige's prints, in particular, were closely tied to spatial geography. Publishers often released index sheets - essentially pictorial table-of-contents maps - showing buyers where each view in a series was located along a route or across the city of Edo. This tradition of mapping Japanese Meisho-e (pictures of famous places) has continued into the digital age, with interactive maps now allowing us to explore the real-world landscapes behind these historic prints.
For example, you can explore the landscapes that inspired Hokusai's famous Mount Fuji prints with the Views of Mount Fuji interactive map. Created in ArcGIS Scene Viewer, the map overlays seven of Hokusai's prints onto the actual landscapes they depict. Among them are The Great Wave off Kanagawa and Fine Wind, Clear Morning (also known as South Wind, Clear Sky or Red Fuji), which is shown in the screenshot at the top of this post.
Steven Feldman has now released an interactive map of Hiroshige's One Hundred Famous Views of Edo. This isn't the first interactive map I've come across featuring Hiroshige's prints. The Ukiyo-e Map, for example, maps not only his One Hundred Famous Views of Edo, but also his Famous Views of the Sixty-odd Provinces, Eight Views of Ōmi, and Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō. It also includes Hokusai's Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji.
Unfortunately, while the Ukiyo-e Map is perhaps the most comprehensive map of meisho-e (pictures of famous places), it is now missing its basemap. Perhaps Steven could take a sneak peek at the map's JavaScript, which contains the coordinates of all the woodblock prints featured, and use them to expand the scope of his own map.
Alternatively, if you'd like to get the Ukiyo-e Map working again, there's a workaround. Open your browser's developer tools while viewing the map, select the Console, and paste in the following JavaScript code. This will load the necessary libraries and add an OpenFreeMap Positron basemap to the existing Leaflet map.
'(async () => {
// Load required CSS
const css = [
'https://unpkg.com/maplibre-gl@5.24.0/dist/maplibre-gl.css';
];
css.forEach(url => {
const link = document.createElement('link');
link.rel = 'stylesheet';
link.href = url;
document.head.appendChild(link);
});
// Load JavaScript libraries
function loadScript(url) {
return new Promise((resolve, reject) => {
const script = document.createElement('script');
script.src = url;
script.onload = resolve;
script.onerror = reject;
document.head.appendChild(script);
});
}
await loadScript(
'https://unpkg.com/maplibre-gl@5.24.0/dist/maplibre-gl.js';
);
await loadScript(
'https://unpkg.com/@maplibre/maplibre-gl-leaflet@0.1.1/leaflet-maplibre-gl.js';
);
// Remove the unsuccessful raster layer
mymap.eachLayer(layer => {
if (layer._url?.includes('tiles.openfreemap.org/styles/positron')) {
mymap.removeLayer(layer);
}
});
// Add OpenFreeMap Positron
L.maplibreGL({
style: 'https://tiles.openfreemap.org/styles/positron';
}).addTo(mymap);
console.log('OpenFreeMap Positron added!');
})();'
Hat-tip: Map of the Week
Read the original article at Maps Mania.
Enjoyed this post? Follow @mapsmania on Bluesky.

http://googlemapsmania.blogspot.com/2026/10/famous-place-pictures-in-japanese-art.html

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Famous Place Pictures in Japanese Art In the 1830s, Katsushika ...

2026-10-30T13:23:12Z

Famous Place Pictures in Japanese Art

In the 1830s, Katsushika Hokusai ignited a golden age of Japanese landscape art with his Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji. Capturing the topography, seasons, and human activity around Japan's sacred peak, Hokusai’s masterpiece inspired his contemporary, Utagawa Hiroshige, to create One Hundred Famous Views of Edo - a breathtaking visual survey of Japan’s bustling capital.
Both series belong to Ukiyo-e (浮世絵), "pictures of the floating world," a genre of Edo-period woodblock prints. More specifically, they elevated the sub-genre of Meisho-e (名所絵), or "famous place pictures." Fueled by a 19th-century domestic travel boom, these prints served as both fine art and geographical guides, cataloging iconic landmarks and scenic views for a public eager to explore.
Before single-sheet landscape prints exploded in popularity, publisher-cartographers created Meisho Ki (名所記) - bound, woodblock-printed travel guides that paired pictorial maps of major routes like the Tokaido highway with illustrated sights. Hokusai and Hiroshige were directly drawing on this established cartographic publishing tradition.
Hiroshige's prints, in particular, were closely tied to spatial geography. Publishers often released index sheets - essentially pictorial table-of-contents maps - showing buyers where each view in a series was located along a route or across the city of Edo. This tradition of mapping Japanese Meisho-e (pictures of famous places) has continued into the digital age, with interactive maps now allowing us to explore the real-world landscapes behind these historic prints.
For example, you can explore the landscapes that inspired Hokusai's famous Mount Fuji prints with the Views of Mount Fuji interactive map. Created in ArcGIS Scene Viewer, the map overlays seven of Hokusai's prints onto the actual landscapes they depict. Among them are The Great Wave off Kanagawa and Fine Wind, Clear Morning (also known as South Wind, Clear Sky or Red Fuji), which is shown in the screenshot at the top of this post.
Steven Feldman has now released an interactive map of Hiroshige's One Hundred Famous Views of Edo. This isn't the first interactive map I've come across featuring Hiroshige's prints. The Ukiyo-e Map, for example, maps not only his One Hundred Famous Views of Edo, but also his Famous Views of the Sixty-odd Provinces, Eight Views of Ōmi, and Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō. It also includes Hokusai's Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji.
Unfortunately, while the Ukiyo-e Map is perhaps the most comprehensive map of meisho-e (pictures of famous places), it is now missing its basemap. Perhaps Steven could take a sneak peek at the map's JavaScript, which contains the coordinates of all the woodblock prints featured, and use them to expand the scope of his own map.
Alternatively, if you'd like to get the Ukiyo-e Map working again, there's a workaround. Open your browser's developer tools while viewing the map, select the Console, and paste in the following JavaScript code. This will load the necessary libraries and add an OpenFreeMap Positron basemap to the existing Leaflet map.
'(async () => {
// Load required CSS
const css = [
'https://unpkg.com/maplibre-gl@5.24.0/dist/maplibre-gl.css';
];
css.forEach(url => {
const link = document.createElement('link');
link.rel = 'stylesheet';
link.href = url;
document.head.appendChild(link);
});
// Load JavaScript libraries
function loadScript(url) {
return new Promise((resolve, reject) => {
const script = document.createElement('script');
script.src = url;
script.onload = resolve;
script.onerror = reject;
document.head.appendChild(script);
});
}
await loadScript(
'https://unpkg.com/maplibre-gl@5.24.0/dist/maplibre-gl.js';
);
await loadScript(
'https://unpkg.com/@maplibre/maplibre-gl-leaflet@0.1.1/leaflet-maplibre-gl.js';
);
// Remove the unsuccessful raster layer
mymap.eachLayer(layer => {
if (layer._url?.includes('tiles.openfreemap.org/styles/positron')) {
mymap.removeLayer(layer);
}
});
// Add OpenFreeMap Positron
L.maplibreGL({
style: 'https://tiles.openfreemap.org/styles/positron';
}).addTo(mymap);
console.log('OpenFreeMap Positron added!');
})();'
Hat-tip: Map of the Week
Read the original article at Maps Mania.
Enjoyed this post? Follow @mapsmania on Bluesky.

https://googlemapsmania.blogspot.com/2026/10/famous-place-pictures-in-japanese-art.html

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To Infinity & Beyond Yesterday I visited the Night Maps ...

2026-10-29T13:31:34Z

To Infinity & Beyond

Yesterday I visited the Night Maps exhibition at the Warburg Institute, which explores the history of celestial maps and globes, and how mapping the heavens has shaped our understanding of the world. Which might account for why I was so blown away by TripGeo Space - a brand new collection of space and sci-fi development projects.
Currently, TripGeo Space consists of two interstellar space tours:
Solar Trip
Cosmic Trip
I'm not sure how accurately either tour represents the cosmos, or even whether they strictly qualify as maps at all. However, both are really impressive interactive 3D tours - and perhaps the closest I'll ever get to fulfilling my dreams of space travel.
In Solar Trip, you're taken on “a hyper-fast cruise round the real Solar System aboard the luxury starliner Seraphine”. There are plenty of options to customise your voyage. You can choose from several themed trips, including tours of the giant planets, Jupiter's moons, Saturn's rings and the icy worlds beyond Neptune, or plan your own itinerary using the voyage planner.
You can also adjust your travel speed, choose where to begin aboard the ship, and switch between cinematic and relativistic drive effects. During the voyage, you can customise the visual detail, turn narration on or off, and explore the ship itself. My tip is to remember two particularly useful keyboard shortcuts: N skips to the next destination, while Tab opens the voyage planner. Both are handy if you want to get straight to the next stop or plot your own course through the Solar System.
After exploring our Solar System, you should be ready to travel to infinity and beyond with Cosmic Trip. Aboard the survey ship Lumen, you embark on a voyage through space and time, starting with the Big Bang and travelling through the formation of the first stars and galaxies, black holes, stellar nurseries and the many different lives and deaths of stars, before eventually returning home to our own Sun and Earth.
As with Solar Trip, you can explore the ship, customise your journey and adjust the speed of your voyage. Cosmic Trip also features a cosmic timeline, along with science consoles containing articles and infographics that explain the phenomena you encounter along the way.
Read the original article at Maps Mania.
Enjoyed this post? Follow @mapsmania on Bluesky.

http://googlemapsmania.blogspot.com/2026/10/to-infinity-beyond.html

#solartrip #solarsystem #cosmictrip #space #infinity #maps #warburginstitute #nightmaps #tripgeospace #mapsmania

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