The CSIRO News Blog weighs in on the recent Landsat 8 launch, and talks about why another satellite matters, when they sky is already choc-full of them.

The BBC talks of a recent study in the Netherlands that was able to accurately measure rainfall across the whole country, using mobile phone towers, which could help increase the accuracy of flood warnings.

The creatively titled Apple Bitch blog talks of how, months after the Apple Maps debacle, Apple has begun advertising for software-engineers-cum-map-experts to fill its ranks. Fancy a move to Cupertino?

The official Google Maps blog recently posted, in honour of its ten-year anniversary, a video and an interactive timeline of the Maps product, which uses the Google Maps API. It’s  a neat little presentation, and a good overview of the history to boot.

Speaking of anniversaries, Landsat recently had its 40th anniversary (can you believe it?), so Wired have posted some of the best images (one of which, the Volcanic dome known as the Richat structure in Mauritania, taken by Landsat 7 on Jan. 11, 2001, is pictured above) collected by the programme in that time.

Jonathan Crowe talks of a free-air Lunar Gravity map recently released by NASA, compiled from data from the GRAIL mission, with the digital elevation model provided by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter laser altimeter. Don’t know what a free-air gravity map is? Follow the link to find out.

As a bonus from Jonathan Crowe, he’s also alerted me to an interactive map of the Discworld’s principal city, Ankh Morpork that’s been created for the iPad. A must-see for any fans of the inimitable Terry Pratchett.

Mapbrief has a series of posts on why map portals don’t work. To quote: “’Why Map Portals Don’t Work’ is a five-part exploration of why the dominant visual grammar of GIS interfaces serves its public audience so poorly and continues to diverge from the best practices found most everywhere else on the web.”