Last month it was Science Friday, this month it’s Co.DESIGN: NASA Creates Insanely High-Res Map Of America’s Trees, And Offers A Lesson In Information Design. Tim Maly describes our map of tree biomass in the U.S. (based on an exquisite data set from Woods Hole Research Center), and lets me rant a bit about color palettes and data visualization.
Last week, Flora Lichtman of Science Friday put together a short video about the views of Earth NASA has produced over the years. She began with the famous Earthrise photo taken by the crew of Apollo 8, then interviewed me and NASA scientist Gene Feldman. We discussed the differences between photographs and data visualizations, and the craftsmanship that went into the 2002 Blue Marble. There’s even an audio clip from the late Carl Sagan, describing the Pale Blue Dot image from Voyager 1. All spurred by global imagery from the new Suomi NPP satellite.
