Month: December 2015

Another fun tool is one that can end discussions about where you would end up if you dug straight down through the earth. One would then end up at the antipodes, the place on earth diametrically opposite to it. The antipodes map show exactly this. From most places one would end up in an ocean, but for Europe one could start from Spain and Portugal and be lucky to end up in New Zealand. This clearly shows how much of the world is covered by oceans. According to this website, the only countries ending up in China are Argentina and Chile.

Now I have had two days of break from this calendar. So here comes a few posts in a row.

The True Size is a tool similar to the Mercator puzzle I posted two years ago, in that it makes it possible to see how the different countries change in size away from the equator due to how the Mercator projection works. This projection was originally meant for navigation at sea, so any line between two points have the correct compass direction, but the countries do not have the correct area.

I have a liking for fantasy maps or maps of fictional worlds. And in that category I find the GTA V map to be nice. While I don’t play the game myself it seems like a lot of work has gone into mapping every point of interest in the game on the map. It has a atlas type map, a satellite map, a road map and a UV Invert map that looks like a hand drawn map. The map window uses Google’s map engine, which is easy to use.

Have you ever tried to draw a map of the world? It’s not as easy as one might think. For a geography student I think the continents would have the right size and be at the right place, but for others it can be a tricky task. The blog World Map Archive have many so called “first try drawings of the world, which range from somewhat realistic map to Picasso-inspired squares and triangles instead of continents. I find hand drawn maps of all kinds beautiful, and it is interesting to see in how many ways people from around the world can make a drawing of the world.

Colouring books for adults are popular now, last time I was in a bookshop I saw a table full of them, along with pencils and markers to colour them in. While I have not tried any of them yet I can see how it can be relaxing to fill them in.

But what if you want but can’t find a geographically themed colouring book, or simply don’t want to buy one of the available books? Then the new colouring maps made by The Norwegian Mapping Authority may be something for you. They have made detailed black and white maps from many Norwegian cities, ready to download, print out and colour in. If you happen to know someone who are doing this then a printout of these maps can be a nice gift, or you can try to make one yourself of your hometown or favourite city.

The thing I want to feature today is not GIS related, but more geography and climate related. It is a poster I have here at home called the Weather Radials poster. I like good design and good visualisations of data, so when I saw this poster online I quickly ordered it. The designers have managed to show the weather over a whole year in 35 different cities in a very elegant way, and it is easy to see when a city had extreme temperatures or a lot of rain. It is possible to see the radials online on their website without buying the poster, but these radials are from their 2013 poster. I see in their store that they also now have a 2014 version. While it is a little expensive for a poster it is is printed in museum-quality as they say, on thick, matte paper and will last a long time. So it is a nice gift for yourself or others.

Today I will share a beautiful black and white 3D map by Patricio Gonzalez Vivo inspired by mathematical artist Ryoji Ikeda. With its flashing black and white squares on buildings and roads the map looks alive, as if it was a real time model and not just a clever design. And when zoomed out the map turns into a high-contrast map with a red grid. I find it beautiful and think such a map could be cool on a car gps.

Click on the picture above to get to the full resolution picture that can be used (for non-commercial use) as a desktop background or for a personal mapping project.

A few weeks back I made a hand drawn map of Europe for a short movie of my travels over the last years. Now I want to write a little about how I made this map. I happened to already have a world borders dataset that I found here. So using the software that came with my printer I printed out a map of Europe from ArcGIS on 9 (3×3) sheets of paper and taped that together before pinning it to the corkboard. I then put a thick white cardboard over it and taped that to the paper below so they would not move. Then using a small light table (seen above the drawing on the second picture) I shined light through both layers and drew one country at a time, first by pencil and then with a black pen. I had to simplify the borders a when drawing, but in my opinion that gives the map more of a handmade quality.  The finished drawn and coloured map can be seen above, and I have done a few corrections to the picture in Photoshop to make it look as good as possible.

Here are a few pictures of the process of making this map, clicking on them will open up a gallery. The video I made was in widescreen/16×9 ratio so that’s why two of the images below are in that format.

I like to travel, and over the last years I have been travelling a lot in Europe since I have worked for the international student association EGEA. When I made a speech for the end of my board year I wanted to find out how far I had travelled in total by plane to events and meetings for EGEA. In order to do that I first looked up the tickets, and wrote down the airports I had travelled through for each travel, like Trondheim-Amsterdam, Amsterdam Munich, Vienna-Amsterdam, Amsterdam-Trondheim.  I then used the tool Great Circle Mapper to find the distances. On this website I entered the airport codes, which for the previous example is trd-ams,ams-muc,vie-ams,ams-trd, and then I got the distances for each part and the total for that travel. This website can also do some other interesting calculations. Click the image above to see how this looks like.

The distances are called great circle paths, which, according to their FAQ is the shortest path on the surface of a sphere between two points on that sphere,  but since the Earth is not a true sphere the term geodesic path is a more technically correct term. There are also other tools to calculate a flight distance, such as Travelmath. They are both based on Vincenty’s formulae and uses the WGS84 ellipsoid model which is also used for GPS.

Maps generated by the Great Circle Mapper – copyright © Karl L. Swartz.