Artist’s conception of MAVEN’s Imaging UltraViolet Spectrograph (IUVS) observing the “Christmas Lights Aurora” on Mars. Copyright: NASA/JPL-Caltech, University of Colorado.

A couple weeks ago we all laughed as the Android icon was shown pissing all over Apple. This, in addition to features such as “Edwards Snow Den” atop The White House, has caused Google to pull the plug on the whole Map Maker project, as reported by the BBC. Fun while it lasted.

Thanks to Facebook ads, you’ve probably already seen the new UAV Lily a hundred times. And while it is just another consumer grade drone, the promo video of the first “throw and shoot” camera at Lidar News is oh so satisfying on oh so many levels.

The geOps blog revealed their project, Worldwide Transit Tracker, which maps the movement of public transport services from no less than 249 different providers around the world in real time. If that’s too slow for you, you can take control of your city’s speed to make it come alive like SimCity.

HERE continued to come through with the goods, this week collating a collection of beautiful maps with a title suggesting certain habits of the online mapping community: “Satisfy your map porn addiction with these beauties.”

Fernando Gil curated this impressive project that mines and refines images found on the internet to create long-term time-lapses of glaciers that grow and shrink, and cityscapes that evolve.  You don’t even need your own camera.

Share your love for maps with Trace app, which lets you trace out a route for your loved one to follow around the neighbourhood to discover what shape you’ve drawn. The featured shape as shown on Geoawesomeness is of course a soppy big heart.

We’ve spoken about the Ultradistancia project before, in which Argentinian artist Federico Winer alters aerial imagery of humanity’s impact on Earth to psychedelic effect. But now it’s available in all the HD video glory it deserves, as posted by Geoawsomeness.

Just to space you out a bit more, the NASA blog has shown that planet Mars has auroras of epic proportions. It turns out that since Mars does not have a regular magnetic field, it doesn’t have the same-old intermittent northern lights that we’re familiar with. Instead it has long-lasting, low-lying, hyper-coloured auroras, which follow magnetic fields that “sprout out of the ground like mushrooms.” I’ll leave you with that imagery.