I collect maps, although just prints so far. One of my favorites has been this universe map from National Georaphic.
One of the authors of that map has collaborated to develop a map of the entire universe where essentially all interested features of space, from specific satellites in Earth’s orbit to the edge of the Milky Way and the limit of the visible universe, can be easily viewed on one flat surface. The trick was to to follow the same perspective as Saul Steinberg’s famous “View of the World from 9th Avenue”:
Here’s a great NYT essay describing their accomplishment. And their paper itself is quite readable.
Here is the actual map. On Internet Explorer, push F11 to display it full screen.
And here are a bunch of other formats, in case you want to print it out and frame it, as I plan to do.
Eiji Hirai | 29-Jan-04 at 10:28 pm | Permalink
This reminds me of the excellent CGI sequence at the start of Contact http://contact-themovie.warnerbros.com/main.html the Robert Zemeckis film based on Carl Sagan’s novel. The sequence is a pan out from Earth amidst a cacophony of radio and television noise, and the
further we pan out, the further back in broadcast history we go and the less you hear. We also pan past various landmarks in the universe like the Oort cloud, past the Horsehead Nebula and past the local group of galaxies, as if we’re interactively moving through images of the Hubble Deep Field, http://www.stsci.edu/ftp/science/hdf/hdf.html . Very nice.