The geography-cartography-topography of the planet Mars (which took me ageeeees to complete)! You can see the whole project here.
I wanted to show the striking dichotomy of the Marsian surface (the two hemispheres differ in elevation by 1 to 3 km). While the northern one-third is relatively flat and lies below the conventional ‘zero elevation’ level (aka the “sea level”, only there’s no ocean to evaluate), the southern hemisphere is mountains and highlands heavily cratered. Plus there are large river valleys and outflow channels cutting through the separation. Our deserts are quite boring in comparison!
Tag: charts & graphs
The Moon, illustrated in Astronomy, 1875, by J. Rambosson
Relative Magnitudes; ‘Geographicus Burritt’ (Huntington Chart of the Solar System), 1856.
Geographical and astronomical illustrations from the mid-1800s
by John Philipps Emslie
(several via the Wellcome Collection)
Asa Smith. Celestial Illustrations from Smith’s Illustrated Astronomy. 1851.
Wood engravings with hand highlighting, written by the principal of Public School No. 12 in New York City with the goal “to present all the distinguishing principles in physical Astronomy with as few words as possible”.
Meteorite Distribution Map of Vesta
This map shows the distribution of HED meteorites on the surface of Vesta. HED meteorites are a type of achondrites, stony meteorites that do not contain any chondrules. Here, each color represents a different mineral: green is howardite, blue is eucrite, and red is diogenite. Areas where more than one mineral is present are either yellow for diogenitic howardite or cyan for euritic howardite. Rocks containing howardite are the most abundant on Vesta.
The map shows that the two hemispheres have different mineral distributions: the northern hemisphere is more eucritic rich while the southern hemisphere is more diogenitic rich. For reference, two craters and two basins are marked.
Image Credit: E. Ammannito et al. doi:10.1038/nature12665
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