Closed astrobokonon closed 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
Whew. That was pretty fiddly. But, I implemented spatial filtering for the shapefiles so that should be a little quicker for everything.
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.
Put into testing by Camelot@b5b33e9 but really the bulk of the work to make this happen is in Camelot@ecb66c9.
Seems to work fine, so I'm closing this.
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.