Last week, Jessica Ball of the American Geophysical Union’s Magma Cum Laude blog pointed out this map of natural hazards in the U.S., published by the New York Times: The map has many of the design virtues common in graphics from the Times (clean, focused on the data, clearly labeled, small multiples), but when I […]
One of the best things about international travel (at least to a geek like me) is to see how different cultures approach design and signage. Here’s a few from Blue Mountains National Park, near Sydney, Australia.
Four erupting volcanoes on Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula are visible in a single satellite image.
Poorly chosen map projections can be very misleading, as demonstrated by the claim that “most” of the Northern Hemisphere was covered in snow and ice in early February.
Over the past week or two, there has been severe flooding in Australia, Brazil, Sri Lanka, and the Phillipines, but all we’ve shown on the Earth Observatory is the flooding in Australia. Why?
One of my (many) pet peeves in data visualization is vertical exaggeration. For example, here’s a 3D rendered view (from the south looking north) of Mount Etna: Compared to the real thing, photographed from the International Space Station (from the north looking south): The 3D view is scaled so the volcano appears much higher than […]
In the process of writing captions I can run into some amazing stuff, like this photo of incandescent rocks arcing through the sky during the collapse of a lava bench near Kilauea.
North and South America, August 9, 2010. Full Caption By Mark Robinson, LROC Team. As LRO orbits the Moon every two hours sending down a stream of science data, it is easy to forget how close the Moon is to the Earth. The average distance between the two heavenly bodies is just 384,399 km (238,854 […]
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.
