Help:Producing maps with xplanet

Producing maps with xplanet is a wikipedia tutorial showing how to use xplanet as a piece of GIS kit, to make map images suitable for use on wikipedia and other such websites. By the end of the tutorial, you should be able to quickly and accurately produce maps of any region suitable for publication.

Getting xplanet
See the project page for downloads

Getting started
Typical command-line use of xplanet (this all goes on one line)

xplanet.exe -projection orthographic -config script.txt -latitude 52.25 -longitude 21.00 -num_times 1 -geometry 600x600 -output xplanet_image.jpeg -radius 70 -fontsize 16

Result:



Script files
Some of the map data is typically stored in a script file (a text file on your computer) - the script I used for the above map was simply:

[earth] grid=true grid1=10 grid2=10 shade=100

shade=100 is important, because it says that nighttime regions should be shaded at 100% of daytime illumination. When drawing maps, the nighttime shading isn't normally needed, so set that to 100 to turn it off

Try it again, setting the latitude to 90, shows the north polar area



How to plot locations on the map with labels
City locations are available for download - see xplanet site, and can be plotted on maps (as can anything you can generate a lat/long/name textfile for)

How to draw country-borders using the arcfile list
See the URL below for some examples

Xplanet sample output: with markerfiles produced with weather scripts

[http://thomas-wehr.homeip.net/space/iss-position.php Xplanet sample output: following the International Spacestation ISS around the earth showing various information like volcanos, quakes. Using satellites as targets.]

[http://thomas-wehr.homeip.net/weather/hurricane.php Xplanet sample output: hurricane information using arcfile options. Storm data collected by scripts.]

Drawing on maps tutorial
plot significant points, then use them as template in GIMP?