Throughout many years of hiking the alps, my mother has amassed a fairly large collection of hiking maps. Recently, I found myself wanting to somehow make this drawer-filling mountain of paper more easily searchable. As a first step, I georeferenced them to create a map-map which you can see below. As a second step, I put them all back into the cupboard.

Below is an illustration of all the area that is covered by 40 of these hiking maps.

For a recent project, I wanted to analyse satellite images from the European Space Agency’s Sentinel-2 mission over specific areas and over time. The Sentinel-2 mission is pretty great: it has 10-meter resolution optical imagery, takes a picture of almost all points on the continental earth every five days, and is completely free to access. My areas of interest were quite small (low single-digit square kilometres), whereas Sentinel-2 satellite images are usually published in huge 100x100km2 chunks. This post describes how I went about this in what seems to me a fairly efficient way. All data and software used here is open access/open source.