Sky & Telescope's Earth Globe

The editors of Sky & Telescope based this unique 12-inch globe of our home planet on NASA satellite imagery and other data. Sky & Telescope's art department combined two separate datasets: one showing Earth's landmasses very close to their natural color and the other depicting the fascinating topography hidden underwater. After we combined the land and water data sets into a single flat map, we next needed to convert that map into projections that could be wrapped around a 3-dimensional globe. Cartographer Michael Zeiler of Eclipse-Maps.com created these projections using ArcGIS software by Esri. The result is a globe that shows all of Earth's major geographical features, both on land and under the waves. We purposefully limited the labels to major geographical features to preserve the globe's natural beauty, and to give a sense of what Earth looks like from outer space. The better we know Earth, the better equipped we are to understand alien worlds within our solar system and