Science infographics and animations
Last week I collaborated with Dr. Sarah Low to explain ventilators in a series of animations. Sarah is an anesthesiology resident at Massachusetts General Hospital, and a leader of CoVent-19 - one of many efforts to address the ventilator shortage during the Covid-19 outbreak. The CoVent-19 organization is run by a team of thirteen medical doctors, including Sarah. Their goal is to teach engineers…
This map was one of my favorites, so I’m excited to share the code tutorial for a geologic map of the Moon! Although I already made a geologic map of Mars , this Moon map was much more difficult because the geologic data was split into six different datasets. Each dataset had unique labels (and sometimes different data formats) so I spent a lot of time piecing the data together to create a…
My next two maps in the Atlas of Space series show the topography and geology of the Moon. These were some of my favorite datasets in the project - the Moon is our closest celestial neighbor, and we know a lot more about the Moon than about our neighboring planets. The Apollo missions even returned several hundred kilograms of lunar rock to the Earth for detailed analysis. The moon is tidally…
This week’s map is just for fun! The animated GIF illustrates the storms on Jupiter, but it’s an artistic drawing rather than an accurate representation of the clouds in real time. The majority of the work was done in Photoshop, based on images published from the Cassini spacecraft in 2000 and 2006. At first I wasn’t planning to map Jupiter, because the surface is constantly changing. We also have…
Two weeks ago I shared a map of all the stars you can see from Earth , alongside the Western constellations. But the Western constellations are only one of many patterns of stars invented by cultures around the world. This week’s map illustrates the animals, people, and objects imagined in the sky by more than 30 different civilizations. To make this map I used data from Stellarium , an…
This week’s map is a topographic map of Mars! I already shared the code to make these topographic maps a few weeks ago, so for this blog post I decided to write a better description of how I illustrated the ornamental borders and decided on a design style for the map collection. Although style design was the least technical part of the project, I think it actually took just as much time - if not…
This week’s map shows every single star visible from Earth, on the darkest night with the clearest sky. The map also includes all of the brightest galaxies, nebulae, and star clusters from W.H. Finlay’s Concise Catalog of Deep-sky Objects . I illustrated the familiar Western star patterns - or asterisms - in blue and gold, as well as the scientific constellation boundaries in red. Although the…
This is one of the very few animated maps I made for my space cartography project! NASA publishes many Earth datasets at monthly time scales, and this GIF uses one frame per month to show the fluctuating seasons. The animation focuses mainly on data about Arctic sea ice and vegetation, but it was hard to choose - NASA has many other beautiful seasonal datasets, like fire, temperature, or rainfall.…
This week’s map is an artistic rendition of the geologic map of Mars designed by the USGS . I used the same geology data as the original map, but I added more topographic and label data, redesigned the visual style, and also edited the key for a more general audience. One of the most difficult parts of making this map was translating the key into plain English. The original USGS map was designed…
This week’s blog post is a topographic map of the planet Mercury - the smallest planet and the one closest to the sun. I wanted to map each of the rocky planets in the same style, so this week’s code tutorial actually also includes code for mapping Mars, Venus, and the Moon. Although Mercury has very few labeled features, I really liked the IAU naming theme for the planet. Craters on Mercury are…