I saw this and instantly wanted to laser it! 
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YES, YES, YES!!! Thank you for sharing! 
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Wow. Totally.
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I think inverting those b/w might give you a âmore correctâ output as whites will be higher than blacks when doing a 3d engrave.
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âŚWOW! This is amazing.
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This is a typical cartographic technique of shadowing to the bottom (south) of the image versus the real shadow effect of a SUN that is to the south casting a shadow to the northern side of the slope --> you just donât see it ⌠it just doesnât have the impact. Very nice, and I agree that this would be a fantastic laser rendering project.
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The forum is on it today! Great find.
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These are really cool! Reminds me of viewing the moon through a telescope; way more interesting around the quarters rather than a full moon, specifically because of the shadows near the Terminator line!
Edit: binoculars work too.
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No South America, damn! 
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It is amazing how much detail is in the shadows and the affects that they have on the images. Thanks for sharing.
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You could certainly generate the images you want yourself. Thereâs all sorts of free (as in beer and as in speech) elevation and mapping data out there that you could pull into a 3d program of your choice to generate the lighting (you could even use a more realistic light / direction, if you wanted).
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It appears that I live in the land of no shadowsâŚ
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But only the Shadow knows ⌠
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While I wait for my GlowForge, I have been generating combined STL, raster and vector files for all states in the US. The STL files will be used to carve 3D woods maps of each state using a CNC router, then the raster and vector files will be used to laser vector features like roads and rivers onto the 3D carved wood map using the GlowForge. It has been a fun project producing all the needed files and a challenge to have all the various data sets in registration.
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Thatâs a really neat project. Great idea.
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@timtsuga This is a great idea to combine the CNC with the Laser. It will be cool to see how these turn out.
@joe Thanks for sharing this link. These are really cool! 
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Ooooh⌠Super cool! Thanks for sharing
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That is a fantastic idea!
I canât wait to see what this looks like when you get a laser.
I had been playing around with weird map projections that I could âseamlesslyâ engrave on wooden boxes. Data conversion from the various map formats is a huge pain!
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@jkopel Here is a link to a site that has digital vector files of World maps in several projections, U.S Continental map file and all 50 states that may interest you, save you some time.
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That is a great link!
Not quite what I needed though since I wanted to process âarbitraryâ vector maps and make them project seamlessly on a cube (i.e. a box). There is code out there to do the projection changes but everything I found isl written for the existing weird GIS vector formats.
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