This week, the Public Lab community newsletter is being compiled from Houston where its nice and hot, so I want to make sure to drop the coolest Public Lab news on you (I know, bad humor)! Its been another great week with lots of mappings, people testing out and writing about their balloon mapping kits and the promise of a great upcoming workshop on thermal imaging:

1) The next issue of the Grassroots Mapping Forum is in full swing, if you're interested in getting involved, check out this call for contributors.

2) Last Saturday, folks in the Bay area of California both mapped and created an aerial film of Dolores Park.

3) There will be a thermal flashlight workshop at AS220 in Providence on May 26th from 1-4pm. Come make, use and help develop low cost tools for thermal imaging! Sign up here: http://labs.as220.org/courses/FAB114.

4) In Louisiana, we had two days of perfect weather that allowed us to map a couple of different spots-- Big Branch NWR and Wetlands Conservancy. Scott Eustis of Gulf Restoration Network, wrote a short summary here.

5) Aerial mapping blog posts and articles. Geek.com writer, Sal Cangeloso tried out the balloon mapping kit for the first time, Hollow (an interactive documentary) collaborator, Eric Lovell, did a test flight before filming begins and Lifehacker.com contributor, Thorin Klosowski, wrote a great post (with video included) about aerial mapping.

6) Randomly selected research notes from the past week: Making a balloon- making a jig (posted by mathew) Sketches for airborne particulate sensor for camera phones (posted by warren) NDVI out of the shadows (posted by cfastie) Using kites as atmospheric wind speed meters (posted by mathew) Follow up on faucet cover camera enclosure (posted by patcoyle, with a nice follow-up by Sal Cangeloso)

As always, if we missed something, please either send it out to the listserve or email your content to shannon@publiclaboratory.org to be included in the next newsletter. Happy Friday, Shannon