Maps and Essay by Michael L kelly
PROJECTIONS
AND
PERCEPTION
How we show and see the world
read the entire article in print in Issue 2.
Our world is a sphere. Carl Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot. The astronaut view that launched Earth Day. Seen from one angle, centering the 180° meridian — the International Date Line — it appears as almost all water. The magnitude of the Pacific is undeniable.
The direct opposite side, 0°, centers the Prime Meridian, the site — and creation — of the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, a borough of southeast London in the United Kingdom.
But that invisible line also passes through Tema, Ghana, an Atlantic port city just east of Accra, the country’s capital and largest city. Tema, with a population over half a million, is sometimes referred to as “the center of the world,” as it is the closest city to Null Island, the fictional destination located at 0° latitude and 0° longitude.
Ghana itself is “the Black Star of Africa,” so called for the five-pointed graphic that is front and center on its flag, designed by Theodosia Okoh in 1957, the year it became the first sub-Saharan African nation to gain its independence — from the United Kingdom.
Each of those views is also an orthographic projection, dating back to antiquity, with Hipparchus using it to map the rising and setting of stars in the second century BCE. The projection essentially intends to simulate looking at a globe. Seen today, and in this manner, they demonstrate a simple point — we cannot know the whole world at once. But that hasn’t stopped us from trying.
Above: A 24-hour rotation of the Earth on its 23.5° axis. Inefficient and insufficient
for showing the bigger picture.
To see as much as possible with minimal distortion, we might circumnavigate this globe, pausing every ninety degrees of longitude — or stay still and wait twenty-four hours (give or take), as Tema rotates once around Earth’s 23.5° axis.
read the entire article in print in Issue 2.
Above: Spreads from “Projections and Perception: How We Show and See the World” from perhaps Issue 2, featuring multiple views of the Earth, including the Airocean projection (1954), codeveloped by R. Buckminster Fuller and Shoji Sadao.
Michael L Kelly is a Brooklyn-based designer, educator, and writer who does everything he can to make those roles overlap, ideally with civic engagement somewhere in the mix. He has worked with small non-profits and large companies around the world, and is Creative Director for a small mapmaking company, Good Foot Enterprises. mlkelly.com
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