Friday, September 25, 2015

The Leaflet Map of Pluto & the 3D Globe


The Australian Broadcasting Corporation has created an interactive Leaflet map of Pluto from an enhanced colour image of the planet. The ABC's Pluto Map allows you to zoom in on the most high-resolution image of Pluto released by NASA so far.

The map tiles for the interactive were created using Zoomify. Creating map tiles form an image with Zoomify is a fairly painless process thanks to Bjørn Sandvik's Leaflet.Zoomify plug-in. If you want to create map tiles for Leaflet from your own image then Bjorn's Showing Zoomify Images with Leaflet tutorial is a good place to learn how to use Zoomify to create your map tiles and how to use the resulting tiles with the Leaflet mapping platform.


If you want to take NASA's Pluto for a spin then you should also take a look at the New York Time's 3d globe of Pluto created from NASA imagery. The NYT's Pluto Globe uses a number of images of the planet to create an interactive globe of Pluto.

Some parts of the NYT's Pluto globe consist of higher resolution images than other parts of the planet and the planet's 'south pole' remains uncovered for now. However the Pluto Globe does include a few map labels showing you the locations of some of the planet's named regions.

No comments: