The patterns of the sky and planet Earth
With this issue of Location is Personal, we’re closing the year and the run of this newsletter. It’s been a pleasure to enrich your inboxes with projects, thoughts, and musings on location and what it means to be human. You can find all of our issues here.
The stars and the Earth present physical patterns that we can rely upon to tell us where we are in space and time. Yet these seemingly fixed geographies and points symbolize widely different things to whoever is looking at them. Changing leaves announce the slow approach of winter, and if you’re in the Northern Hemisphere, so does Orion’s presence in the night sky. Yet these same patterns have differing local meanings given by every culture that’s ever seen them, both practical and mythical.
Stars can help people and machines navigate — for example, Nainoa Thompson writes about using the stars to travel long distances across the Pacific. Or the stars can have spiritual meanings, like the Emu in the Sky that helps Kamilaroi and Euahlayi people track the lifecycle of the birds around them.
When Eleanor Lutz charted many cultures’ interpretations of the night sky in a single image, she created a rich visual encyclopedia of the human imagination.
Eleanor said some of her favorite constellation names translated to Stars of Water, Rabbit Tracks, and the Hippopotamus. With these visuals, Eleanor shows us that the sky is a mirror of the worlds and times that people have lived in.
Thinking about how we map the night sky can help us think about other kinds of mapping. To map is to identify what’s there, but also to assign meaning and hierarchy — because no one view can show everything at once.
Some will see mountain ranges while others see borders. Some will see a rabbit and others will see a dragon. With every map, we choose a sliver of the infinite number of things we could show, and that choice is a way of interpreting the world. Of course, that means maps, or the making of maps, can be used to divide territories and people. Colonizers have redrawn entire continents and destroyed entire people with artificial borders. Boundaries are the source of disputes between nations. Wars have been waged over something as small as an island.
Eleanor’s work of mapping the stars and their cultural interpretations shows a sense of connection rather than division.
There are similarities in Tim Wallace’s work. Tim is an engineer at Descartes Labs and does some of our favorite experimental work with satellite imagery. Tim says that one thing he learned to see when looking at the Earth from above is the relative size of things. “This was particularly heart-wrenching when I was working on projects about conflicts, where I could see clearly the scale of disaster and destruction,” he says. He then had an idea of scaling places to fit into others — like Aleppo in Queens, “to give the people of one place a better sense of the scale of what is happening in the other.”
One of the values of satellite imagery in mapping is that it reminds us of the multiplicity that is always present on the Earth’s surface. Using satellite imagery and scale, Tim creates context and connections between people living on different sides of the globe. Looking at imagery is a chance to experience a lighter version of the feeling that many astronauts report on seeing the living face of Earth for the first time: the overview effect.
And here is another technical but relevant fact. Satellites themselves use the stars to navigate. Star trackers have helped spacecraft orient themselves since the early days of the space race. Only by referring to these (nearly) fixed points can they tell exactly where they’re looking on Earth. This is the high-tech counterpoint to the stargazing that we do from here, using the night sky to reflect on our place in the universe.
And with this, we close and end a few things. The year, the decade, and this newsletter. “Location is Personal” had 365 rotations around the Sun, 11 issues, 835.9 Jovian days, 3.8 Mercurian years, and endless support from people inside and outside Mapbox. Thank you.
What we’re reading
- Get to know the moons of our solar system with this atlas from National Geographic
- According to the New Yorker, astrology is more popular than ever as people seek certainty and meaning in the stars above
- Wonder what’s currently orbiting around Earth? Check out “Stuff in Space” for realtime visualization of orbit data
- The National Library of Scotland tweets about “Astronomicum Caesareum,” a 16th-century book of volvelles.
- Our Milky Way isn’t flat. It’s warped. Check out the 3D map in The Los Angles Times
- “Soon, Satellites Will be Able to Watch You Everywhere All The Time”, MIT Technology Review
- “The Shape of Space,” by Fred Scharmen in Places Journal
- The most recent astronaut photos of Earth
- An interview with people involved in the Decolonizing Mars conference from Gizmodo
- Ridiculously detailed clips of Space Shuttle launches, with expert commentary
- An incredibly detailed PDF about the systems needed for an atmospheric Venus base, by Karen R. Pease with Venus Labs
- “Where to find rapidly released space image data” (2016) by Emily Lakadwalla
Who we’re following
- Ariel Waldman, NASA advisor, Antarctic explorer and Global Director of Science Hack Day
- Ladies of Landsat, Spreading badassery across globe with STEMism
- Chani Nicholas, writer and astrologer
- Harel Dan, GIS and remote sensing analyst
- Jessica Meir, astronaut in space right now and goose scientist (yes, really)
- Abel Méndez, one of many astrobiologists looking for life elsewhere in the universe
- Tabetha Boyajian, co-discoverer of “Tabby’s Star”
- NextLaunch, so we know when and where to tune into live streams of space launches
What we’re building
- Studio has a new look with Style Components
- Store and retrieve location-based media with the Content Tagging solution
- Share your custom style with your team, or the whole world
- Any user, free or paid, can now create unlimited private tilesets with their Mapbox account
- Terrain + minimalism make GPS activity stand out
- Atlas customers can now deploy Atlas on Kubernetes
- We introduced a new Interactive Storytelling template. Here is how you can build with it.
- Style parameters are now available with the Static Images API
Developer spotlight
Eleanor Lutz is an information designer in Seattle. She works on illustration projects that usually involve science and data, and she particularly loves biology and astronomy. In her free time, she likes to rock climb and learns new crafts like embroidery or knitting.
Tim Wallace is a geographer and visual storyteller for Descartes Labs in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He was recently a graphics editor for The New York Times, where he made stories with information gathered from land, sky and space. He has a Ph.D. in Geography from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Tim leads a creative team that is charged with telling stories and supporting journalism. Some of their recent projects include collaborations with The Washington Post on fall foliage and National Geographic on cranberry bogs.
Events
- DC Data Engineering Meetup 3: OpenStreetMap ETL Pipeline | December 18
- Webinar: Mapbox Studio + Framer: Easy interactive prototyping | January 9
- Webinar: Data is the core of every map — print or digital | January 28
Mapbox Jobs
- Senior Software Engineer, Security | SF or DC
- Engineering Manager, Search | DC (preferred) or SF
- Engineering Manager, Navigation SDK | S.F.
- Senior Technical Account Manager | SF or DC
- Senior iOS Engineer, Navigation SDK | SF
Location is Personal: Issue 11, December 2019 was originally published in Points of interest on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.