Light Pollution Map Tiles

Here's a simple way to turn light pollution GeoTIFF data into map tiles using gdal. It's just a small script I made, nothing fancy, but it works!

What you need

• Light pollution GeoTIFF data (download for example from here)
• gdal
• mb-util (to convert tiles into a single mbtiles file, install it with pip install mbutil)

Quick Start

1. Extract the downloaded GeoTIFF if it's zipped.
2. Run the script like this:

./tile.sh World_Atlas_2015.tif colors.txt 3-12 48 output_tiles

This will make tiles for zoom levels 3-12 in the output_tiles folder using 48 threads.

3. (optional) Convert your tiles to MBTiles format:

mb-util --silent output_tiles --scheme=tms lightpollution.mbtiles

(you need to use --scheme=tms because gdal2tiles outputs already in the XYZ scheme, but mb-utils tries to flip the Y axis again)

That's it! You'll end up with a lightpollution.mbtiles file ready to use.