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Comment by dgrin91 | Hacker News Reader

Cool site, but it really needs a legend. I can intuit that white is high light pollution because its on city centers, but how bad is green? I have no idea what I would see there.

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I was thinking this same thing. I live in what the map has as a "pinkish red" area (right outside of white) and I just recently camped in a brown orange area (3 levels darker). The difference was noticeable but not a crazy amount. I really wonder how much darker the blue or not even colored areas are.

I've been to a few blue and darker areas, and those are properly mind blowing. That said, I live in a dark green area, and you can see some definition to the milky way on a clear and dry night

I'll try and make this. beginner cs undergrad looking for maps-based things to build. if anyone can reply and hit me with tips, quick info, or just a laundry list of things I'd be wise to google & learn to use, please lmk thanks!

Digital mapmakers often have a hard time getting color scales right; it's common to just sort of wing it and end up with something that looks like crap and/or doesn't work well with the nature of the dataset.

I'd recommend using one of the tried and tested scales from ColorBrewer (https://colorbrewer2.org). Great info there to help you decide.

And when you do pick a scale, Chroma.js (https://www.vis4.net/chromajs) is a fantastic color library that has built-in support for ColorBrewer scales.

Also http://turfjs.org has some great tools for manipulating GeoJSON.

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