(Courtesy of Galileo as it got a gravity boost from Earth (1994?) on its way to Jupiter)
Is this not one meaning of beauty?
What's the most realistic view of our planet? Well of course from even before we had a planet most of us have had views like this:
[pictures of tropics, rural, urban, suburbs, temperate, arctic, industrial, ocean]
Let's step back and look:
(Courtesy of Galileo
as it got a gravity boost from Earth (1994?) on its way to Jupiter)
Is this not one meaning of beauty?
Globes are also nice because we can see the planet's surface more clearly (no clouds), and we don't need a space ship:
(a favored gift)
Sometimes a flat map is wanted, because we want to see more of the planet at once, or we want something we can fold up and carry around.
Maps (no maps, give me more real views!)
Maps show the surface of a globe (which is spherical) on a flat surface. Projecting the surface of a sphere onto a flat object cannot be accurate in all ways. Following are several attempts to sacrifice as little accuracy as possible...
Buckminster Fuller projected a globe's surface onto an icosahedron, then unfolds it into the Dymaxion map (with cuts through some of the icosahedron's triangles, to keep from slicing up any continents):
Arno Peters' re-discovery of Gall's equal-area cylindrical projection:
(see an interesting
paper about Peters' contribution to cartography)
On a Gall-Peters map, the size of different areas relative to each other is accurate. The Mercator projection, popular until recently, distorts relative sizes:
[need image]
There are other improvements on the Mercator projection, most of them non-rectangular like the Robinson projection:
[need image]
Of course if you had ever lived on Mir:
...you could just look out the window any time:
[keep adding recognizable
close-ups from space, echoes of different artispheres and climates
from beginning]
(earth not quite round?)
(more maps, globes and space picture resources?)
(views of other planets?)