ESA Election Analysis

The Ecological Society of America has released an analysis of the recent elections. It makes for interesting reading.

Mercury solar eclipse today

I just found out that there is a Mercury solar eclipse happening today! http://sunearth.gsfc.nasa.gov/eclipse/OH/transit06.html http://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov/hotshots/ Wow - Mercury solar eclipse and Rumsfeld stepping down - what a great day!

MS launch of Virtual Earth 3D

See posts on the new MS product to rival Google Earth.

Cartographic History of Trans-Atlantic Telegraph Cables

This is a pretty cool collection of historic maps documenting communication cables put down across the Atlantic and other bodies of water. Via Visual Complexity

New Bowen videos - armchair geographers rejoice!

Now for your geographic and viewing pleasure: William Bowen et al. have made available some nice movies of fly-throughs over California. See the SF Bay video for example. (His panoramic views of Cali are here.)

Waste time watching satellites orbit!

I just found this really cool Java Applet from NASA that allows you to find and view an animation of any satellite position real-time. Enjoy!

Geo Work Group

hi, starting thursday at 4 in the GIIF, we're trying to start up a weekly "geo work-group". it's still open as to what that means so come this thursday if you want to help decide. the basic idea is that we have a lot of people around here with diverse knowledge and skillsets so this will be a venue to share the knowledge and (to quote maggi) "develop a community of practice". potential happenings are: 1. people bring GIS/RS related projects they want some insight on and get help from appropriate people. 2. a large group project that will lead to a poster or paper. 3. short presentations or how-to's focused on the more technical aspects of software and what not. etc. so bring any ideas to the giif 4pm thursday. and to sweeten the deal, casey will give a demo on how to find the extents of a shapefile using a python script.

Track those satellites

The Union of Concerned Scientists has a cool database that will tell you the name, owner, country of origin, use, mass, and many more details about 828 satellites that may or may not get you in trouble. The data is downloadable in Excel and plain text formats. Even better, you can get email notifications about when the list is updated.

OBIA Wiki

Dr. Hay and colleagues at U. Calgary have developed a Wiki for the new(-ish) field of Object Based Image Analysis (or whatever the field ends up being called - see discussion). It is a useful resource, with information on theory, literature, future directions; check it out.

New WMS with NAIP imagery

hi, Abe set up a server with Mapserver, and got all the NAIP imagery. We now have a OGC compliant (more or less) WMS server with the 1M data. This can be accessed via Arc plug-in (talk to Abe) and most open source GIS software. I wrote up what I did here:

http://bpederse.googlepages.com/caliwms.