Credits & data sources

Every topographic bottle starts as raw elevation data — grids of measured ground heights built from satellite radar, aerial lidar and national mapping surveys, blended by region and, across the United States, sampled as finely as one height every few meters. We decode those rasters and trace true contour lines at fixed vertical intervals, so every line on the bottle is a real elevation on real ground. Rivers, lakes and coastlines are carved in from vector hydrography, and the finished linework is written at real-world scale into the same file the laser burns — the window you frame on the map is exactly the ground you get.

We did not produce the source elevation data, and any errors in our contours are ours, not the providers’.

Elevation tiles: Terrain Tiles by Mapzen, built with Tilezen’s Joerd and hosted on the AWS Registry of Open Data. They blend the sources below, each credited as the Terrain Tiles attribution notes require:

• ArcticDEM terrain data — DEM(s) created from DigitalGlobe, Inc. imagery and funded under National Science Foundation awards 1043681, 1559691 and 1542736. Licensed CC BY 4.0.
• Australia terrain data © Commonwealth of Australia (Geoscience Australia) 2017. Licensed CC BY 4.0.
• Austria terrain data © offene Daten Österreichs — Digitales Geländemodell (DGM) Österreich. Licensed CC BY 3.0 AT.
• Canada terrain data contains information licensed under the Open Government Licence – Canada.
• Europe terrain data produced using Copernicus data and information funded by the European Union — EU-DEM layers.
• Global ETOPO1 terrain data — U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
• Mexico terrain data source: INEGI, Continental relief, 2016.
• New Zealand terrain data Copyright 2011 Crown copyright © Land Information New Zealand and the New Zealand Government (All rights reserved). Licensed CC BY 3.0 NZ.
• Norway terrain data © Kartverket. Licensed CC BY 4.0.
• United Kingdom terrain data © Environment Agency copyright and/or database right 2015. All rights reserved. Licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.
• United States 3DEP (formerly NED), and global GMTED2010 and SRTM terrain data, courtesy of the U.S. Geological Survey. Data modified by us to produce contour lines.

Every star chart is generated from raw astronomical data at the moment you choose — no two are alike, and none is a copy of an existing map. Star positions and brightness come from the Yale Bright Star Catalog (public domain, 8,404 stars to the naked-eye limit), rotated to your exact place and instant, with the Moon and planets positioned by Astronomy Engine. The constellation figures follow the conventional patterns of modern astronomical charts.

• Constellation figures: ConstellationLines by Marc van der Sluys (hemel.waarnemen.com), licensed CC BY 4.0. Modified — drawn from Bright Star Catalog positions, precessed to the chosen date.
• Star data: Yale Bright Star Catalog, 5th ed. (Hoffleit & Warren), distributed by NASA/ADC and CDS. Public-domain scientific measurements.
• Sky computation: Astronomy Engine by Don Cross, MIT licence.
• Time-zone boundaries: geo-tz (MIT), over boundary data derived from OpenStreetMap © OpenStreetMap contributors, ODbL. Used to place a coordinate in its real zone — the chart is drawn for local time, so the zone decides the sky.

The globe you spin to pick your place shows the real earth, not an illustration: NASA’s Blue Marble composite for the whole planet, sharpening into the Landsat program’s cloud-free annual mosaic as you fly closer, with coastline and border reference lines from the same archive. Imagery is courtesy of NASA’s Global Imagery Browse Services (GIBS), part of NASA’s Earth Science Data and Information System (ESDIS), and the U.S. Geological Survey’s Landsat program — all United States public domain.

The water our contours stop at — rivers, lakes, shorelines — comes from OpenStreetMap © OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL), delivered in the OpenMapTiles schema and hosted by OpenFreeMap.

Star positions and magnitudes from the Yale Bright Star Catalogue, 5th Revised Edition (Hoffleit & Warren, 1991), published by the Astronomical Data Center, NSSDC/ADC, obtained via CDS/VizieR catalogue V/50.

Constellation figures by the International Astronomical Union and Sky & Telescope magazine (Alan MacRobert, Roger Sinnott, Rick Fienberg), licensed CC BY 4.0. The IAU’s licence statement is made in respect of its constellation charts. Figures have been modified.

Machine-readable line data via d3-celestial, which includes further line modifications by its author:

Copyright (c) 2015, Olaf Frohn. All rights reserved.

Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met: 1. Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer. 2. Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution. 3. Neither the name of the copyright holder nor the names of its contributors may be used to endorse or promote products derived from this software without specific prior written permission.

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Worldwide place search uses data from OpenStreetMap © OpenStreetMap contributors. US address search uses the U.S. Census Bureau Geocoder.

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Bebas Neue — Copyright © 2010 by Dharma Type. · Montserrat — Copyright 2024 The Montserrat Project Authors. · IBM Plex Sans and IBM Plex Mono — Copyright © 2017 IBM Corp., with Reserved Font Name “Plex”. · Teko — Copyright 2023 The Teko Project Authors. · Playfair Display — Copyright 2017 The Playfair Display Project Authors, with Reserved Font Name “Playfair Display”.

Lost Mountain Engraving is not affiliated with, endorsed, sponsored or certified by NASA, the IAU, Sky & Telescope, the U.S. Census Bureau, the U.S. Geological Survey, Mapzen, Tilezen, Amazon Web Services, OpenStreetMap, IBM, or any of the data providers named on this page.