You don't hear a lot about it, but NASA makes a trove of its data public on open.nasa.gov. With about the same effort it takes to search on Google, you can find raw images of Mars, or a complete database of the 900-plus impact craters documented on the surface of Venus.

The most popular use of the site is looking at the photos taken by astronauts. And last month, rocket scientist and data wiz Nathan Bergey used those pictures to make a data visualization in the form of a map of all the photographs ever taken by ISS astronauts.

"I use NASA data every day, even though I don't work for NASA." Bergey wrote for open.NASA's blog. "They have many detailed and rich datasets available for reading/viewing by the general public. The problem though is that they are often published in archaic formats buried under hard to use interfaces."

For his project, he used some popular programming tools to screen scrape the standard search interface—that is, get his computer to gather all the available data—and got the latitude and longitude of each photograph (the point on the Earth that ISS was directly above when an astronaut snapped a photo). All in all, he acquired locations for 1,129,177 photos.

In the final maps, each location is represented by a single pixel. You can see that pictures over land are so much more popular than sea photos that continents are roughly outlined. And when Bergey assigned each mission a color, the new map revealed that the beautiful parabolic waves going up and down the planet in his dataset were all the result of a single mission—specifically, Astronaut Don Pettit's time-lapse of the earth, which covers the orbit of Expedition 30/31.

You can read more about the maps and how Bergey made them on his website, but if his work gets you itching to see the photographs themselves, you can find them all on an interactive map that NASA made, or check out their highlights for the week.

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