In the Public Lab community newsletter this week, get involved in a number of events happening in the Northeast U.S., organize a Spectral Challenge meet-up in your neighborhood and check out the new maps from the Public Lab archive appearing in Google Earth and Maps.

Public Lab imagery in Google Earth and Maps. Most of the public domain data in the Public Lab archive has been imported to Google Earth and Maps both as base-layers and as historical imagery in the Google Earth collection. The maps from the archive can be easily browsed through a Google Earth KML file that will list all of the maps and automatically navigate to each place and time as selected from the list of maps. To get your maps in the Public Lab Archive, and thus Google Maps, they must be open source and exported on MapKnitter. You can get in touch with Stewart Long (stewart@publiclab.org, username "gonzoearth") who actually imports MapKnitter maps into the archive and coordinates with Google. Read more here: http://publiclab.org/archive

Spectral Challenge Meet-ups. As folks have started planning SpectralChallenge meet-ups, they helpfully wrote up a guide to the basics. Check it out! Need ideas about what you could use as a project for SpectralChallenge? Check out the growing list of ideas here.

White House Champions of Change: Citizen Science. Do you know, a champion of change for the field of citizen science? If so, nominate the individual or organization by this Tuesday, April 30th.

Middlebury College Organic Farm mapping. This Tuesday, join a gathering in Middlebury to potentially try out a couple of flying devices.

New Museum Ideas City Festival. May 4 in NYC is a big day in the spotlight at the New Museum's Ideas City Festival and we need people! All community members please join and help lead either of two separate balloon launches (one with Kickstarter and Oscar Bratt, the other with Hester Street Collaborative and Veronica Acosta), the MapKnitter training (also with Kickstarter), or the panel discussion on Earth Observation Systems (with Spacebusters and Nina Ilieva). See the events on the left side of http://publiclab.org/wiki/new-york-city and/or Contact liz@publiclaboratory.org for connecting to individual projects.

iFarm Save the Date. On May 18th, FarmHack.net and GreenStartnh.org will be gathering in Lee, NH to try out new technologies and techniques, including NDVI and spectral analysis. Mark your calendars and RSVP!

Research Notes Best lamp (posted by huggo) I for one welcome our new IRcam overlords (posted by donblair) DaffyCam (posted by cfastie) Better adjustable camera mount (posted by sonofaquark) Limits on flame spectra (posted by summers) NIR image enhancement (posted by ttaylor) Rosco! (posted by cfastie) NIR filter switch parts (posted by dan.beavers) CrocusCam (posted by cfastie) Superblue (posted by cfastie)

On a final note, if you'd like to subscribe to the newsletter, you can now do so! As always, if anything was missed, please post a research note, email the list, or send a message to shannon@publiclaboratory.org for inclusion in the next newsletter. Have a great weekend, Shannon