Charles Apple

The Strange Maps blog today posted another interesting piece: This one shows all the solar eclipses projected from 2001 to 2025.

A taste:

Click on this thumbnail for a larger map:

The Strange Maps blogger notes:

Total solar eclipses occur when the Moon passes between the Earth and the Sun, obscuring the sunlight and leaving visible only a much fainter corona. This ‘totality’ is only ever visible in a narrow bands of the Earth’s surface, as this map demonstrates. Interestingly, the shape of those bands bends with their relative position on the map - from slight curves close to the equator to almost circular nearer the pole.

Don’t think that the Sun (and Moon) behave differently over different parts of the globe: it’s the globe that gets distorted when it gets stretched out over a flat map surface, especially over the polar areas.

The map originated with the good folks at NASA, which says it’s OK to distribute them as long as you use this credit line: “Eclipse Predictions by Fred Espenak, NASA/GSFC“.

Thanks, NASA. Thanks, Fred.

Find NASA’s eclipse home page — which contains a lot of interesting data — here:
http://sunearth.gsfc.nasa.gov/eclipse/eclipse.html

Find the Strange Maps blog here:
http://strangemaps.wordpress.com/

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This entry was posted on Sunday, July 29th, 2007 at 11:09 am and is filed under VizEds Blog, Graphics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.