I'm a map junkie; I grew up in the UK, where we have the Ordnance Survey, who makes some of the best maps in the world. At school we actually got lessons in mapreading and analysis.
As a result, whenever I go to another country the first thing I do is to try and find some decent maps of the area. With, you know, contours on them. It can be surprisingly hard.
It's an agglomeration of most maps that are available -- you can pick the area, and then see a giant list of the types of maps that cover those coordinates. From topo maps to high resolution aerial photographs, to solar irradiance, to rainfall -- all types of interesting materials.
There are a lot of different overlays as well as older versions available. I especially recommend the 'Dufour Map' and the 'Siegfried Map' from the 19th century, the earliest official maps of the country.
Wow, thanks! I've been using the SwissMobility maps, which is mostly using the same data, but this is way more slick (and faster). Check out the embedding options! That's really cool.
They have coverage of the whole Europe and an app with offline maps. They also have other map layers - Summer/Winter tourism, roadmap, physical, 19th century and one that can be printed for blind people.
The US National Map has better, more recent topos. These GeoPDFs allow turning on/off layers (e.g., satellite image, PLSS grid lines, etc). You can also download historic topos.
Hey this is awesome! I'm a little confused about the NatGeo copyright; aren't these USGS maps and therefore not copyrighted?
If you want an online map, MapZen recently produced a really excellent outdoor map style. No contours, but really beautiful relief shading and an emphasis on hiking trails, parks, etc. It's based on open data including OpenStreetmap, SRTM, and a lot of other sources. https://mapzen.com/blog/walkabout/
(I can't get the page to load yet, but own a bunch of NatGeo maps-)
It probably falls under something akin to fair use. NatGeo is likely using a lot of USGS geo data, but doing additional work on top, adding in trails, making the map nice, etc.
I tried to make my own maps once for my GPS unit, it gave me a new level of respect for mapmakers. It's not terribly hard to take the raw LIDAR survey data and make crude maps, but making a nice polished zoomable map with trails, POI's, etc is laborious.
> I tried to make my own maps once for my GPS unit, it gave me a new level of respect for mapmakers. It's not terribly hard to take the raw LIDAR survey data and make crude maps, but making a nice polished zoomable map with trails, POI's, etc is laborious.
It was even more laborious before computers were involved in cartography. My first employer was full of old timers who manually carved contour lines and maintained trig stations.
In the past I have ordered topographic maps from Raven Maps and they really are excellent. Not cheap, but you can get plain paper suitable for framing or laminated if you want to write on them with whiteboard markers. I have a giant one of the USA, plus a few of states I've lived in.
Raven has some really beautiful maps. Their landforms and drainage, in particular, is a real work of art. I used to have it up on an office wall but I don't have any surface big enough for it at the moment.
I actually sort of did this (but I cut them w/ a CNC router rather than 3D printing them).
https://imgur.com/a/fMy19 is the finished product; http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:1524543 are the files I generated and used. They aren't truly accurate maps -- they do have the elevation exaggerated to be more visually interesting, but it's consistently scaled. Some people have gone on to print them w/ 3d printers (rumor is they're on the wall at Makerbot now).
As noahnoahnoah's comment alludes to, there is kind of a problem with elevation differences on Earth being small. For example, the vertical distance from sea level to the summit of Mt. Everest is only 0.1% of the Earth's radius.
If you made a globe with a 1 foot diameter, Mt. Everest should then be on about 0.2 millimeters above the surface (if you choose to represent sea level as the surface).
Edit: this problem is less dramatic if you make either models either of local regions, or extremely large models (because relative to the size of a region like the Bay Area, the highest elevations in the region are fairly high).
Thanks for the hat tip! TinyMtn is my fun hobby, and I've been making high-resolution 3D printed maps from USGS and SRTM1 data for over three years now. I'm just getting into the extensive LiDAR data now, too. The process is: download the highest-resolution data I cna find from USGS's National Map Viewer, process with GDAL, convert to a triangle mesh (custom tools), and then upload to Shapeways or convert to GCode for my XCarve. Some of these prints, along with CNC models of Meteor Crater, Telluride, Mt Fuji, Mt Hood, and Crater Lake are on Etsy:
https://www.etsy.com/shop/TinyMtn
You can get low resolution digital elevation models over the US from the USGS or NASA. From there you can triangulate and generate an stl file fairly easily.
I'm a huge fan of http://historicalmaps.arcgis.com/usgs/ for finding USGS maps - it's a simple, visual browser to find all available years + scale levels for any location.
Note that they can be quite old (USGS rev. 2001). They also don't have a lot of detail - I was looking at the section of Appalachian trail I hiked and it would it quite difficult to use these maps even though they are nominally larger scale than the map I've used.
I have a wooden topographical map made with a 3D CNC cut of the SF Bay Area hanging on my wall. It's about 18x18 inches and almost 2 inches deep out of a single piece of almost 2 inch thick piece of plywood. The part I like the most is that the layers in the plywood reveal an automatic topographical map visualization. Got it from here if curious: http://3dwoodenmap.com/
Wow, the map for my area is seriously outdated. My town looks about like it did when I was a kid in the 1980s. It's easy to tell because my town has consistently grown since then from around 20k population to 150k population, and a lot of things that were built up in the late 80s aren't yet on that map.
It's quite fascinating to get a refresher of what it looked like in the past.
It's a nice concept. I like being able to see this stuff.
As a result, whenever I go to another country the first thing I do is to try and find some decent maps of the area. With, you know, contours on them. It can be surprisingly hard.
I was so, so glad to find this.