Digital cartography picks

My top pick is NASA’s new integration of the Apollo Zone Digital data. It was done at Ames Research Centre thanks to a newly developed software system for orbital imagery. The software allows fully automated image mosaicking and terrain modeling of data taken from different positions, with different exposure and resolution, and even selects best image when multiple coverage exists. You can read about this exiting new development in the article Powerful Pixels: Mapping the “Apollo Zone” which has links to the open source software libraries Ames Stereo PipelineNeo-Geography Toolkit and NASA Vision Workbench. You can click here to download a kml file for viewing the image mosaic and digital elevation model in Google Earth. I tried it out and it looks great. Check these screen captures below:

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