Earth Matters

An astronaut took this photograph of dust obscuring the Taklamakan Desert, with the Tien Shan mountains in the distance, on September 5, 2010.

G.Projector is an elegant and free tool for converting map projections.

One of the simplest ways to improve the look of graphics on a computer screen is to anti-alias them. Here are some examples of aliased graphics, and a few techniques to improve them.

Photograph of the Milky Way rising (setting?) above the Earth’s limb from Space Shuttle Discovery.

Satellite view of Mount St. Helens on August 23, 2010.

The free Natural Earth data are a great resource for map-making.