How to Align Vintage Hillshade with Current-ish Imagery

By John Nelson

This whiz-bang how-to walks through the adventure of finding 40 year old hand-drawn hillshade, breathing geographic life into it, finding good-looking imagery, then blending the two into a cartographic product that bends the very fabric of time and space.

Here is the Shaded Relief Archive‘s source hillshade image of Tutuila, drawn by Michael Wood in 1980 (two years after I was born).

This is World Imagery Wayback, where you can browse previous releases of the World Imagery basemap for just-the-right image (not necessarily the newest, but the one that looks best for your map).

They have been smooshed together in ArcGIS Pro. Here’s how the finding and smooshing goes…

Happy Mapping! John

John Nelson

I have far too much fun looking for ways to understand and present data visually, hopefully driving product strategy and engaging users. I work in the ArcGIS Living Atlas team at Esri, pushing and pulling data in all sorts of absurd ways and then sharing the process. I also design user experiences for maps and apps. When I'm not doing those things, I'm chasing around toddlers and wrangling chickens, and generally getting into other ad-hoc adventures. Life is good. You might also like these Styles for ArcGIS Pro: esriurl.com/nelsonstyles

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