A hidden world revealed: Saturn’s largest moon Titan mapped by infrared
Titan has an atmosphere that is impenetrable to visible light. So the Cassini orbiter has been snapping images of the moon using infrared imagery for the past several years. After many, many passes it finally captured enough to make the above composite of Titan’s surface features.
Dunes, mountains, lakes of bubbling methane … it’s all there. Sounds peachy!
What’s that? You’re more into video composites? Then check it:
(via Bad Astronomy)
The United Kingdom of McDonald’s
In a follow-up to his ever popular McMap that showed distance to the nearest McDonald’s in the United States, Stephen Von Worley does the same for the United Kingdom and Ireland.
MIT’s Free Urban Planning Software Will Help Build The Cities Of The Future
If we are to improve the quality of life in our cities—27 of which are expected to have more than 10 million people by 2020—we will have to find a better way to build them. MIT’s new software will help.
Mapping Subnational Microfinance Banking in Nigeria
To better visualize the subnational microfinance landscape in Nigeria, we partnered with the Microfinance Information Exchange (MIX) to build Nigeria.MIXmarket.org. The new site is a window into a part of the world experiencing a microfinance boom with growth rates ranging between 20 to 50 percent over the past few years. The site shows where banks are and aren’t operating and aims to help show why by relating the locations of microfinance banks with potentially relevant socio-economic indicators.
Intercontinental Ballistic Microfinance
What happens when 620,000 lenders fund 615,000 entrepreneurs, students, and other microfinance borrowers around the world?
Five+ years of Kiva loan activity, in full color. Thanks to all the lenders, borrowers, partners, and team members who brightened this map - and helped to change lives in the process.
Mapping Aid and Need to Battle Hunger in the Horn of Africa
We just launched horn.wfp.org, a map visualizing the massive impact of the humanitarian crisis and highlighting critical operation locations in the Horn of Africa. The famine declaration, which went into effect in certain areas in late July, indicates that thousands of people are starving and dying every day. Many international organizations, including our partner on this site the World Food Programme, the food aid arm of the United Nations, expect the famine to impact millions of people.
London Underground Map with Distance Grids
The London Underground Map is famous for ignoring the real geography of the city in favour of a simplified diagram showing the lines and their intersections. The map is so prevalent that Londoners and visitors now probably think of the city in terms of the tube map- referring to an area by the name of a station, or thinking of distances in the tube network as well as the real physical distance above ground.
