Lab 4

It's looking pretty spiffy, if I may say so myself.

Map 1 AND 2 ?!

Ah... so if this is for week 1 then I am extremely late with it, but... here it is!

So, back in the day I was super into astronomy, and I still find sky maps particularly unique. Most maps show some kind of area, but because the position of stars relies on time most sky maps are basically a map of time, which hurts my brain a little when I think too much about it. This sky map shows the northern sky in spring, and as far as sky maps go it's pretty easy for average joes to understand. Since the position of the stars depends not just on the month, but on the very time of night makes exact maps difficult, one must envision how this would all look standing on ground. This exact map is only valid at certain times of the evening throughout spring. For example, if at 9pm in late May you look up, the constellation Virgo should be rising and the star Arcturus should be the most visible in the sky.


And since I'm already running late with map 2, this be a double post.

While I'm being a space fiend, here's a map that's of proportions we can't even fathom. This map is actually my desktop background right now... I find it informative and illuminating. Unspectacularly highlighted is our Sun, located in the measly little Orion Spur, barely an arm of this galaxy. And our Milky Way is over 100,000 light years across! Travel at the speed of light for 100,000 years... and you'll just barely get past one galaxy.

Ah, but if I drone on too much this may get boring. New map next week, and I'll be all caught up!

Lab 3

Mollweide projection for lab 3. Why doesn't my spellchecker recognize "Mollweide"?

Funky map for the week pending.

Graphic from Lab 2

Hopefully this doesn't vary too much from the example.

My Three Links

Flash Earth is a pretty flash application that allows you to view recently updated global maps, that can zoom down to the street level in most places. I think the NASA setting is the neatest, check it out now and see tropical storm Hanna, raging across the southeast :D

Lilly is just plain cool. In the video she's not even 2 years old, and she already has greater geographical knowledge than most American adults. Maybe this link isn't really related to this class, but Lilly totally has a geography related career lined up some day.

Wikimapia is like Wikipedia and Googlemaps smushed into one. The small white squares on the map indicate zoom-in capacity, and clicking on specific countries, states, even counties provides links to useful related websites and comments straight from citizens all over the world!