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LowellObservatory / NightWatch

A system to display a set of important information at an observatory.
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Add county boundaries to maps #24

Closed astrobokonon closed 5 years ago

astrobokonon commented 5 years ago

Title says it all. Maps should have county boundaries on them, and those boundaries should be easy to update/maintain.

MetPy has some baked in to their packages, but they're one of the few. The boundaries are ... irritating to deal with and it's why most mapping packages have avoided including them. Technically they're available from the US Census Bureau (2018's are here...somewhere) and they could be read in using cartopy's shape reader or associated/similar functions.

astrobokonon commented 5 years ago

Ugh. I friggin hate the Census bureau's website. It's just broken at the moment. This is the link that I eventually stumbled upon to download them, but only the Flying Spaghetti Monster knows how long this particular link will work: https://www.census.gov/geographies/mapping-files/time-series/geo/tiger-line-file.2018.html

The most relevant page was: https://www.census.gov/geographies/mapping-files/time-series/geo/carto-boundary-file.html

astrobokonon commented 5 years ago

Whew. That was pretty fiddly. But, I implemented spatial filtering for the shapefiles so that should be a little quicker for everything.

image

astrobokonon commented 5 years ago

Implementation of this is pretty sloppy. That's a primary reason for the potential moving of stuff into a proper submodule that could be more unified, as suggested in issue https://github.com/LowellObservatory/NightWatch/issues/25.

astrobokonon commented 5 years ago

Put into testing by Camelot@b5b33e9 but really the bulk of the work to make this happen is in Camelot@ecb66c9.

astrobokonon commented 5 years ago

Seems to work fine, so I'm closing this.