Orbitlas

Sources

Orbitlas is operated by an individual. License questions go to privacy@orbitlas.com. Borders and measures come from open data with commercial-use licenses. Borders shown are not an endorsement. A legal-view menu switches Natural Earth point-of-view classes. Disputed lines stay dashed and are labeled “Disputed”.

Bundled in this build

• Natural Earth — Public domain. Present-day country polygons, admin-1 for larger countries, country, state and city map labels (populated places and admin-1 label points; military-named sites and research stations removed), point-of-view boundary classes, 50m coastlines at a distance, and 10m coastlines up close. Made with Natural Earth. Public domain.
• William R. Shepherd, Historical Atlas (1926) — Public domain (United States publication before 1930). Political regions traced for the timeline at 750, 1100, 1300, 1500, 1700, and 1900. Fighting marks on the sheets are omitted. The trace is approximate, and a missing plate is labeled no plate traced. William R. Shepherd, Historical Atlas, New York: Henry Holt, 1926. Public domain. Scans from the University of Texas PCL and Wikimedia Commons originals.
• Spruner-Menke Hand-Atlas (1880) and Spruner plates (1855) — Public domain (19th-century atlas plates). Additional political regions where a Shepherd sheet does not cover the date: Mamluk Egypt and Syria, the Timurid polity, Vorder-Indien about 1520, Seljuk lands, Ottoman vassal states, Ming China, and the Chinese empire under Manchu rule. Spruner-Menke Hand-Atlas, 1880, and Spruner/Perthes plates, 1855. Public domain. Commons file pages are cited on each polygon.
• U.S. Census Bureau, American Community Survey — Public domain (U.S. government work). ACS 2023 1-year geographic comparison table GCT1502: percent of people 25 and over with a bachelor's degree. Nation, states, the District of Columbia, counties of 65,000 or more in California, New York, Texas, Florida, and Illinois, and selected cities. The low–high range is the published margin of error. U.S. Census Bureau, American Community Survey 2023 1-year estimates, table GCT1502. Public domain.
• U.S. Census Bureau cartographic boundaries — Public domain (U.S. government work). 2023 county cartographic boundary file at 1:20,000,000, simplified, for the counties drawn in region estimates. State outlines are Natural Earth admin-1. U.S. Census Bureau, 2023 Cartographic Boundary Files. Public domain.
• World Bank Open Data — CC BY 4.0. National population (SP.POP.TOTL), GDP (NY.GDP.MKTP.CD), and GDP per capita (NY.GDP.PCAP.CD). Most recent non-empty value retrieved 2026-10-09. Source: World Bank Open Data, CC BY 4.0.
• NASA Blue Marble — Public domain (US government work). Daytime earth imagery. One public-domain Blue Marble photograph (December 2004), resampled to 4096×2048 and mipmapped. Tile overlays are not composited onto the daylight globe. NASA Blue Marble, public domain.
• NASA Black Marble / Earth at Night — Public domain (US government work). 2012 VIIRS night-lights composite used for the night side. NASA Earth at Night (Black Marble), public domain.
• AWS Terrain Tiles — Derived from public-domain ETOPO1, SRTM, and GMTED2010. Low-resolution Terrarium relief (zoom 2) for the bump map. Relief from AWS Terrain Tiles, derived from ETOPO1, SRTM, and GMTED2010.
• WorldPop — CC BY 4.0. Constrained 1 km population for 2025 (R2025A), summed to national totals. Countries under 50 people, or with no file, are omitted. The rasters are not stored. Rebuild with npm run refresh:worldpop. WorldPop (University of Southampton) and partners. CC BY 4.0. DOI 10.5258/SOTON/WP00840.
• GHSL — Global Human Settlement Layer — CC BY 4.0. GHS-POP R2023A population counts for 2020, summed into 2° cells. Cells under 50 people are omitted. This is not the original 30 arc-second grid. Schiavina, Freire, Carioli, and MacManus (2023), GHS-POP R2023A, European Commission JRC. CC BY 4.0. DOI 10.2905/2FF68A52-5B5B-4A22-8F40-C41DA8332CFE.
• Wikidata — CC0. Diplomatic relation (P530) between catalog countries. A subset of pairs is drawn. Embassy items are a flag, not a complete directory. Wikidata, CC0. Retrieved 2026-10-09.
• Wikidata life dates and places — CC0. Living History waypoints: birth, death, and residence as city pins, not street addresses. Each pin keeps a confidence score and a citation. Figures are deceased by at least 25 years. Prophets are not on this layer. Wikidata, CC0.
• Wikipedia — CC BY-SA 4.0. Living History event titles and the dates those pages name. Article prose is not copied. Each event links to the page. Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Titles and links only.
• CIA World Factbook — Public domain. Every top-level point share the religions field prints, plus a printed range kept as an interval. A hatch means range as printed. No midpoint is stored. Subgroups are not added. The world-religions layer draws the single largest point, or the largest range when that range is at least as large as every point. CIA World Factbook, public domain. Mirror: factbook/factbook.json. Retrieved 2026-10-09.
• CEPII BACI and Gravity — Etalab Open Licence 2.0. 2020 bilateral goods flows (tradeflow_baci) from Gravity V202211. The 48 largest catalog pairs are drawn. IMF columns from that file are not used. CEPII, BACI and Gravity. Etalab Open Licence 2.0.
• GDELT Project — Free to use, including commercially, with attribution and a link back. Country and city article-weighted tone from a rolling 24-hour window and a rolling 7-day window of GDELT 15-minute exports. Cells under 100 articles are dropped. Actor names, article URLs, and person-level rows are not stored. The 24-hour window refreshes hourly and the 7-day window refreshes daily. The GDELT Project — https://www.gdeltproject.org/

Approved, not bundled

These can be ingested later. The app does not invent values for them.

• geoBoundaries — CC BY 4.0. Open administrative boundaries (Runfola et al.) for a later drill-down outside the United States. No geoBoundaries file is copied into this build. US states use Natural Earth. US counties use Census cartographic boundaries. Runfola, D. et al. (2020). geoBoundaries: A global database of political administrative boundaries. PLoS ONE 15(4): e0231866. CC BY 4.0.
• Copernicus DEM — Copernicus data license, free including commercial use, with a required credit. Approved higher-resolution terrain. Not shipped in this build; the relief view uses AWS Terrain Tiles. © DLR e.V. 2014–2018 and © Airbus Defence and Space GmbH 2017–2018 provided under COPERNICUS by the European Union and ESA; all rights reserved.
• Pew Research Center — Religious Composition by Country, 2010–2020 — Pew terms do not allow redistributing the dataset. Citation only. Hackett, Stonawski, Tong, Kramer, Shi, and Zanetti, 2025, doi 10.58094/5shf-2d69. No Pew share is copied. Drawn religion shares are printed CIA World Factbook points. Pew Research Center. doi 10.58094/5shf-2d69.
• Kontur Population — CC BY 4.0. Hexagonal population. Approved for a future hex layer. Not bundled, so no hex counts are invented from it. Kontur Population, CC BY 4.0.

Copernicus DEM credit line

© DLR e.V. 2014–2018 and © Airbus Defence and Space GmbH 2017–2018 provided under COPERNICUS by the European Union and ESA; all rights reserved.

Not used

• EOX Sentinel-2 cloudless mosaics after 2016
• CShapes
• Lowy Institute datasets
• Correlates of War (COW)
• geoBoundaries authoritative tier
• Google Maps, Mapbox, and other proprietary map APIs
• aourednik/historical-basemaps (GPL-3.0). The GeoJSON data license is unresolved for commercial reuse, so those files are not bundled

Religion, sentiment, and counts

Religion and sentiment render only after ingestion as aggregates. Cells below the minimum count (50 people or records, 100 for religion and sentiment) are dropped. Those maps are noindex. GDELT tone is a country and city aggregate over a rolling 24-hour window and a rolling 7-day window, with a link to gdeltproject.org. Cells under 100 articles are dropped. Actor names and article URLs are not stored. Pew's 2025 religious-composition table is cited and not copied. Drawn religion shares are printed CIA World Factbook figures: a point stays a point, and a printed range is hatched and quoted. Gemini Google Search grounding is never stored or placed on a public map.

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