MasterMaps

This autumn I’ll switch hemisphere to experience the spring in New Zealand. I’ll spend two months down under to learn more about cartography and mapping, and to go tramping. Where should I go and what should I see? I need your advice! My journey starts in Auckland and the GeoCart'2012 conference, before I’m heading up to Tongariro National Park and the 8th Mountain Cartography Workshop . Hopefully, Mount Tongario will stay awake . I’ve never been this close to an active volcano before! Then I’m free to go wherever I want. I roughly plan to stay one month on each island. What I would like to know: Are there other mapping events going on in New Zealand in September and October? Anything from conferences, small meetups to short-time courses. Are there museums or institutions worth visiting  for a map geek? I’ve seen that Te Papa in Wellington has an impressive light up satellite photo of New Zealand. Where can I find geospatial datasets in the public domain? I would like to...

Last week I had a great 5 day trek through Jotunheimen in Norway, the same area featured on this blog in a number of posts  ( 1 ,  2 ,  3 ,  4 ,  5 , 6 , 7 )  . The trek included the Norway’s highest mountain, Galdhøpiggen (2,469 m), and the deepest valley, Utladalen . A foggy day on Galdhøpiggen (2,469 m). Visdalen close to Spiterstulen (1,100 m). The view from Kyrkja (2,032 m) Storutla river Avdalen farm in Utladalen. I used my Garmin GPSmap 60CSx to track the route, which allows me to save the tracklogs  on the memory card. After the trek I had 5 GPX  files, one for each day. I used GPSBabel to merge the files into one GPX, jotunheimen_track.gpx . Leaflet don't have native support for rendering GPX files ( there is a plugin though ), so I decided to convert the GPX track to GeoJSON . This can easily be done with ogr2ogr program (part of the great GDAL library ): ogr2ogr -f GeoJSON jotunhei...