An elevation map shows you elevations data with color. The color doesn't reflect the natural landscape (it is not a satellite map), but all the points at a certain altitude have the same color. Sometimes, contour lines are added at regular altitude interval to show the steepness: if two lines are close from each other, the slope is steep.
Here are some example:
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To make these maps, I used data used are from NASA (SRTM 1 and 3), and LandSerf. I provide a Jupyter Notebook that download the data from the NASA website and produced the scripts to be executed by LandSerf, so these maps are done in a few seconds.
If you want to read the raw data from NASA, and get an image out of them without LandSerf, check out this other repository of mine: hgt2pnm.
Before the notebook, I used Perl scripts, also provided here (see the perl_scripts directory).