The Blue Dot Page

Your Blue Dot is the "time-weighted average" of your location on the Earth. That is to say, what is the average place you have lived? For example if you lived in New York City for the first ten years of your life, and then moved to Los Angeles, where you have lived for twenty years, then your Blue Dot would be just east of Santa Fe, New Mexico.

The Blue Dot Computer (an Excel Spreadsheet, v1.0)

I have built a spreadsheet to help you compute your Blue Dot. You can download a copy, or view the readme file. This is emailware - send me a message if you enjoy using it, and tell me where your Blue Dot is.

Internet Mapping Resources

Here are some useful sites for help with computing your Blue Dot.

• U.S. Census Bureau Gazetteer Accepts US place names or zip codes and returns latitude and longitude.
• USGS Mapping Information: GNIS Data Base The definitive US Government database of US place names. This also lists "features", such as mountains and bays, so if you are not near a city, this might be your best bet. Its easy to get a map back from the Tiger Map Service that confirms the place you have requested.
• Tiger Map Service From the US Census Bureau again, it will draw a map based on a given latitude and longitude in the US.
• Online Map Creation Once you have your Blue Dot computed, visit this site, where you can enter the boundaries of a region (with latitudes and longitudes) anywhere in the world and receive back a map of the area.
• Microsoft's TerraServer A project designed to demonstrate Microsoft's database products, it will give you a photo of a location on the earth.

Some Musings on Blue Dots

• What if you are buried at your blue dot? And what if you aren't?
• How about making a movie of your blue dot? As time evolves, your blue dot migrates around the globe.
• This is getting out of hand. Enjoy!