Maps
I love geography and maps!
So what better way to show my love and appreciation for them beside sharing the most interesting ones that I have found so far across the internet.
Hiking Maps
Pacific Crest Trail - Interactive Map
An interactive map of the Pacific Crest Trail for the folks that aim to take on the challenge. I kind of want to do it!
Appalachian Trail - Interactive Map
An interactive map of the Appalachian trail for the folks that aim to take on the challenge. I kind of want to do it!
History Maps
Resurfacing the past - 20,000 ships sank during World War II
Really amazing read and maps showcasing where an approximate location as to where most of the ships where sank during WW2. It is really fascinating and my maps and history buff was fill with excitement seeing this interesting map and it puts WW2 in a great perspective as it was a truly global event fought on the sea and the ground.
Historical Topographic Map Explorer
This is by far one of the coolest maps I have seem so far. I love it so much that I might write a blog post about it, as this map uses historical data and modern data to show the differences between the start of the maps collected 1879 to modern maps from 2010 or even more recent ones. This collab between the USGS and ESRI is top notch.
History Maps
The history of different periods in history plus their maps.
The Stanford Geospatial Network Model of the Roman World
Really cool maps that shows the roman empire commercial routes troughout Europe, North Africa and the Middle East.
Building ages in the Netherlands
This map shows 3D renders of many building in the Netherlands and have then color coded to represent in which period this building were constructed and finished. Amazing!
Maps FM
Find places in the maps where people talked about and explain the history of that place. Awesome way to learn about the history of many places but mainly about the US for now hopefully it picks up in other parts of the globe.
Space Maps
LANDSAT
While not a map necessarily, I still loved this idea from NASA and wanted to save it!
Have your name be spelled out in Land satellite photographs of earth.
Sky map
This is not a map per-se but it is instead a collection of photos of space that were taken to help us understand better how our universe, and constellations looks.
ISS Tracker with live camera
This page have to be one of the coolest one I have found so far! it is so amazing to see where the ISS is, what it is passing over, and see a live feed of what that looks like.
Princeton Vanderbei Gott Projection maps
Accurate representation of the earth in a 2D space. Great for illustrating the inaccuracies of the maps that we have grown to use and rely on while on high school and college but as the saying says “All maps are wrong”. Here is a poster about it by Johnny Harris and here is a Ted-ED video explaining it.
Heavens Above
ISS Interactive 3D Visualizations
Be in the ISS with the 3D model of it flying over the earth! Pretty dope.
WAYFINDER
See and track all of the LEO Satellite and all of the debris that we know of and are able to track.
HAM Radio Maps
GPS jamming map
GPS jamming map of all the areas and places that it is jamming radio frequency that prevent from tracking flights live status. Usually Gov, and militaries do this to prevent civilian or spies from tracking, and knowing what is happening.
MeshTastic Map
Map that shows all the nodes that support the meshtastic network. Quite cool if interesting in RF, LoRa and Meshtastic. Same thing as the one below but with a search function.
Meshmap
Map that shows all the nodes that support the meshtastic network. Quite cool if interesting in RF, LoRa and Meshtastic. Same thing as the one above.
KiwiSDR
This website lets you remotely manipulate a radio from a lot of places all over the world and learn about HAM radio.
Wiggle
Map of all the different WiFi, Bluetooth, and Cellular connections that have been scanned and tracked on this website. Pretty cool and kind of scary at the same time.
APRS
Website for people into HAM Radio. This will locate different radio stations, radio antennas, and vehicles transmitting at the time.
Infrastructure Maps
Operating Nuclear Power Reactors (by Location or Name)
This map maintained by the NRC has every single Nuclear reactor in the US mapped, and it is quite interesting to see. I will try to find how many other types of energy focused maps there are out there :)
Nuclear Stations
After I said that I wanted to find a map with all the global nuclear reactors after finding the map above, someone on Hacker-News posted this map and I am so here for it!
AT&T Long Lines Map
This map shows the network of antennas that the US Gov built during the cold war as backup communications network that used microwaves.
Open Infrastructure Map
Interesting map showing the infrastructure of our world, It is mostly powerlines and energy infrastructure. Really Cool!
Map showing Off-Shore wind farms of Europe
WaterwayMap
A map that tries to document all of the waterways on our world!
New York City Maps
NYC Playgrounds
NYC Bagel shops reviewed and mapped
NYC Subway Sheds
This is a pretty simple website it shows how far away your train station is from other train train stations. Great for people that live or are NYC curious.
Cities and Country Maps
Tokyo 3D Maps with live trains tracking
3D map of Tokyo with real-time train data, CCTV of different busy Tokyo intersections among other things. Great to kind of see the scale of Tokyo from your computer.
Switzerland 3D Map
The swiss government went out of their way to map every single house and address in Switzerland in this 3D map… That is amazing and crazy and I love it!
Transit Maps
Trains FYI
A live, real-time map of passenger train locations in the United States and Canada.
Flight Aware
A real time commercial flight tracker of all the passanger flights happening out there right now.
Globe ads Exchange
Globe ads uses the ads system that planes have to keep taps of each other give you a more advance view of all the flights happening now commercial, or not. It is a pretty powerful yet cool maps app.
Marine Traffic
Ships tracking website, the same as Globe ads but for ships. This website was amazing during the suez canal blockage in 2021? 2022? to see how that blockade stopped the world trade.
MISC & Other maps
Mapping out online communities
How economical is your local Taco Bell? USA
Interesting website that maps and shows the price of different Taco-bell combos!
What Is the World's Emotional Temperature?
A Gallup survey in which they ask individuals in many countries questions in the following topics:
1. Experienced Anger
2. Experienced Sadness
3. Experienced Stress
4. Experienced Worry
5. Experienced Physical Pain
6. Experienced Enjoyment
7. Feel well-rested
8. Learn Something
9. Smile or Laugh
10. Treated with Respect
Map of Cancer-Causing Industrial Air Pollution in the U.S
last updated in August 2023
ProPublica’s analysis of five years of modeled EPA data identified more than 1,000 toxic hot spots across the country and found that an estimated 250,000 people living in them may be exposed to levels of excess cancer risk that the EPA deems unacceptable.
The Opportunity Atlas
The opportunity Atlas shows how every zip-code affects the income level of some of those people that are being raised or were raised there. This could be because of lack of opportunities, failing infrastructure dis-investment on education poor housing among other things.
Language World Map
Simple map app. You input which languages you speak, the maps shows which countries have that language as one of the official languages.
Air Pollution Map
Air pollution tracker. The embed is setup for north America but this would work in any country that is supported on the map which is most of them.
Light Pollution Maps
Light pollution map. This is great for when I want to try to get some beautiful photos of the night sky and I want to prevent as much as possible the interference of human-made lights :)
Game Maps
Geocaching game
This is a treasure game were you download an app and try to find the item that was hiding. simple and cool.
Old School Runescape Map
If you love runescape you would love this. Every game has their own cool website map but I am not trying to fill this website with only maps of the games that I have played. but here are a few other that I really enjoy :)
My own plug!
I created this simple app to help track the places that I want to go, and have been with a little review about them and different icons to make it easy for me to find later!
Conclusion
While this might seem like a lot of different site there is still a lot more websites out there that I don’t know about, or that are not easily accessible.
Some honorable mentions for some other sites would be: