How to discover asteroid impacts

• Derek Cotter says:

  March 11, 2006 at 2:58 pm

  Congratulations to the discoverer, but I’m a little disappointed that the article wasn’t about what I was expecting it to be about, which was a tool for visually emphasizing the circular features of Google Earth images. Instead, the author just saw them in unmassaged Google Earth colours!

  It reminds me that a couple of months ago a friend directed me to Google Earth and I got fascinated by the swirly coloured features of the Sahara desert’s interior. I thought at first it must be some false colour emphasis to bring out subtle features of the desert, but apparently not, those are just normal colour changes.

  I grew up with maps that showed deserts as uniform yellow solitudes with no interesting structure, in contrast with the inhabited regions and their many and varied shades. I hadn’t appreciated that that was nothing more than an expression on the map of where the mapmakers’ focus of attention was: nobody was making maps for Bedouins, or if they were, I wasn’t seeing them.

  I emailed my friend back with my discovery, and a few lines of Lewis Carroll:

  He had bought a large map representing the sea,
  Without the least vestige of land:
  And the crew were much pleased when they found it to be
  A map they could all understand.

  “What’s the good of Mercator’s North Poles and Equators,
  Tropics, Zones, and Meridian Lines?”
  So the Bellman would cry: and the crew would reply
  “They are merely conventional signs!

  “Other maps are such shapes, with their islands and capes!
  But we’ve got our brave Captain to thank:
  (So the crew would protest) “that he’s bought us the best –
  A perfect and absolute blank!”

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