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?
What Not To Do: Vertical Exaggeration
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 […]
More Pyrotechnics from Kilauea
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.
Odds & Ends: Earth from the Moon
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 […]
Odds & Ends: Dust over the Taklamakan Desert
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
G.Projector is an elegant and free tool for converting map projections.
Design Basics: Anti-Aliasing
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.
Odds & Ends: The Milky Way
Photograph of the Milky Way rising (setting?) above the Earth’s limb from Space Shuttle Discovery.
Odds & Ends: Mount St. Helens
Satellite view of Mount St. Helens on August 23, 2010.