Maybe you saw Monday's eclipse and were impressed enough to want to travel to see another one or maybe you missed it because life got in the way or you couldn't justify the time and expense of travel. Or, maybe you're like me and foolishly traveled to Rochester, New York where clouds like to gather and linger. Here is what I saw in the zone of totality, a solid wall of clouds. Even so, the experience was worth it, watching the sky get completely dark in the middle of the day and suddenly get light again. So where will the next ones happen? Unfortunately not in the continental United States fo ..read more

This image of the surface of Mars was released last Spring as part of the Atlas of Mars. Images were compiled from the Emirates Mars Mission "Hope", an approximately two year mission in that began orbiting the planet in 2021. via New York Times  Some remarkably detailed images and maps have been created, including this one showing topography. via New York Times A zoom in on this shows that there are lines of latitude and longitude. From the above image you can see that Olympus Mons, the highest point on Mars is located at around 18 degrees north. This got me thinking ab ..read more

International Taco Day is coming up on Sunday, March 31st - not to be confused with National Taco Day in October. Here are a few maps to enjoy your tacos by. This one I've seen in several taquerias. It took a long time to find a version that is readable online (you may need to click on it to see it at a readable scale) but I finally Reddit came through for me.  Expedia Mexico has another take on Tacography. Here yet another Tacographic map found on Pinterest Japan. Finally there is the Tacopedia, an encyclopedia of Mexican taco culture.   ..read more

 In January I did a series of posts on endangered languages. A few weeks ago the New York Times had an excellent "scrollytelling" graphic story on these languages and where they are spoken within New York City. as you scroll down the page languages appear down Manhattan island. Some quotes from the text: "Most people think of endangered languages as far-flung or exotic, the opposite of cosmopolitan" and "of the 700 or so speakers of Seke, most of whom can be founds in a cluster of villages in Nepal, more than 150 have lived in or around two apartment buildings in Brooklyn." According to ..read more

As promised from last week's post here are a couple additional sites that nicely visualize the path of next month's eclipse. The first one is from Bloomberg, How to Find the Best Cities to Watch the Eclipse. One of the best things about this page is that it starts with an animated map tracing the path and degree of size of the moon's shadow at various locations during the course of the eclipse's time frame. Here is a still frame from 3:10 PM Eastern time. This is followed by a map showing the increases in searches for travel to cities in the path of totality. Little Rock has the largest incre ..read more

In a month a total eclipse will make its way across North America. On April 8th the path will travel quickly, (under two hours) from Mazatlán on Mexico's Pacific coast to Newfoundland, Canada and then into the Atlantic Ocean. There are some really nice visualizations of the eclipse's path. I'll show two today and more next week. The first one I saw at the last fall's NACIS Conference in Pittsburgh.  This visualization by Michala Garrison at NASA, shows both next month's total eclipse and the annular eclipse (where the moon was further from Earth and therefore didn't completely obscure th ..read more

Despite what some officials in Florida want to teach, not all enslaved people appreciated the job training they were getting from their benevolent overseers. In fact there were numerous rebellions. The largest one was in 1811 outside of New Orleans.  The map above is from a story in Nola.com about a reenactment of the rebellion a few years ago. The action had been planned for a long time and began when the plantation owner's slave driver led about two dozen people broke into the house, killed the owner's son and took uniforms and arms from the store house. They planned to march 41 miles ..read more

In response to last week's Black Atlantic post, a reader directed me to the Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade. The Atlas has a companion site,  Echoes: the SlaveVoyages Blog where you can browse through an impressive array of maps produced for the Atlas. Here are the major regions where captives were taken from. via Slave Voyages This overview of the slave trade shows how captives were taken not just to the Americas but also to the Middle East, India and even parts of North Africa via Slave Voyages By far though, the Americas (especially South) had the largest volum ..read more

This map was created by Léopold Lambert to emphasize centrality of the Atlantic Ocean to the slave trade. The map was created for an article in the Funambulist and was recently featured as a “Map of the Week” (yes there are others) for the American Geographical Society’s Ubique blog.   Though not explicitly mentioned, the ocean currents are shown and their role in the routes of the ships can be clearly seen. The article also contains this map by Komla Eza, an artist from Togo showing the triangle trade with the “five changes of matter” in the center. I ..read more

Last week's post showed a huge number of indigenous languages throughout the world. Here is a summary (via the Living Tongues Institute) showing hotspots of endangered languages. The above site has a companion living dictionaries site where you can find a language by map, zoom closer for more detail,    and open its dictionary. When opening the dictionary you can see and listen to the pronunciations of the indigenous words. If geography is not your thing (what?) you can search the sidebar for a specific language ..read more