Ever since we posted an image last week of a coccolithophore plankton bloom, I have been trading notes with Peter Eick, an Earth Observatory reader and seismic surveyor working in the Barents Sea. “I look at your site every morning,” he wrote. “I found today kind of neat since I am in your picture and saw the […]
“… complex datasets require complex visualizations. In general though, simpler is usually the best way to go in the sense that you should make it as easy as possible for a reader to understand what’s going on. You’re the storyteller, so it’s your job to tell them what’s interesting.” —Nathan Yau, author of Visualize This: […]
Post composed by Jesse Allen, Earth Observatory data visualizer One thing we occasionally hear from readers is “Why don’t you have images of…?” We actually get some really fantastic ideas just that way. For instance, just a few weeks ago, we got a request for satellite imagery of the slide at Medvezhiy Glacier in Tajikistan courtesy of […]
Every visualization blog on the planet has already posted one or two of these, but they’re awesome, so here is what Washington, DC looks like via Tweets (blue) and photos posted to Flickr (orange). White areas have both tweets and photos. Unsurprisingly, tourist areas are dominated by photos, residential areas by tweets. More here: See […]
We had fun with last month’s “Where on Earth” mystery, so we thought we’d throw a new image out for your guessing pleasure. A few hints… + German U-boats sank a tug nearby in 1918… + The ponds in the image were formed by retreating glaciers… + The main waterway in the image is […]
On July 29, the Earth Observatory posted an image (above) from the MISR Mystery Image contest. How did you do? Did you guess South Africa? The image is rotated so that north is in the lower right. Visible as a cement-colored grid at this distance, Cape Town sits at the head of the U-shaped bay, […]
There’s an interesting article in today’s New York Times about mapping historical landscapes: Digital Maps Are Giving Scholars the Historical Lay of the Land. Few battles in history have been more scrutinized than Gettysburg’s three blood-soaked days in July 1863, the turning point in the Civil War. Still, there were questions that all the diaries, […]
Although I got back from the 2011 GRC Visualization in Science and Education conference Friday night, my brain still hurts (in a good way). Thanks to Liz and Ghislain for their superb job as conference chairs. To me, the theme of this year’s conference was salience (more precisely, perceptual salience)–the ability of our visual system […]
Arctic Ice Update It’s good fun to follow the progress of our ship full of scientists cruising the Arctic Ocean and scrutinizing the health of marine ecosystems, but what do satellites show is happening to the central part of that ecosystem – the sea ice? The National Snow and Ice Data Center released an update noting that Arctic sea […]
Guest blogger Katie Bethea chimes in from NASA’s Langley Research Center… To call it a “bird’s eye view” is, in this case, not an exaggeration. The bumpy video above was captured by a camera mounted to the belly of a plane that was rising, falling, and pirouetting about 1,000 feet above the roadways and suburbs between […]
