by James Peck

I logged in to the March 11th meeting late so didn’t really understand too much of the first part of Richard Gott’s talk. However, I thoroughly enjoyed the map projection discussion. My father was a navigator in the Air Force and used what we would now call primitive tools to direct his pilot around the skies. On some occasions he mentioned the great circle route to me and at the age of eleven I sort of understood it but didn’t really have the knowledge of how Euclidian geometry was transformed by a third dimension.

I have always been a map lover and in the past have used the AAA maps and books on many a cross country trip. Now and again I think that if my father was still alive how amazed he would be by our current GPS system and things like Google Maps. Almost all of my practical experience with maps covers such small areas that there is no concern of how they are distorted when displayed on flat surfaces.

But I still have an interest in how the different projections of a globe onto a flat surface produce different distortions and was enthralled by Gott’s talk on this subject. His double sided circular map minimizes distortion but does allow you to only see half of the surface at a time; although that is what you see when looking at a globe. His map is quite ingenious!

I was browsing the internet looking for more information on this map when I came across the following link: https://vanderbei.princeton.edu/planets_webgl/GottPlanets.html This shows an interactive Gott map with the circles side by side and allows you to set it spinning or pause it. You can also click anywhere and have that spot move to the center of the circle in either hemisphere; then you can hit reset and pick any other spot. You can also use a menu to pick other places to map like the Moon, Mars or Jupiter.

While Gott was speaking he mentioned his book, _Welcome to the Universe in 3D,_ so I went to Amazon while still listening to him and ordered it; the book arrived the next afternoon. The full Moon looks flat to us because our eyes are too close together relative to the distance to the Moon to get a stereo effect. With the 3D stereo viewer built into the book you can see the moon, and all the other images in amazing 3D. The book shows the varying distances of the stars that make up some of the constellations that we normally see as flat, and so much more.

My favorite image in the book is “Earthrise”, the famous Apollo 8 picture taken in 1968 by astronaut Bill Anders. It is one of the 20th centuries most icon images as it changed our understanding of our place in the Universe (as Time Magazine put it). I think Apollo 8 is underrated as it was the first mission to circle the Moon and return and showed that it could be done. The following link is a video that simulates the part of the Apollo 8 mission when the picture was taken.

I’ll end with one short funny story my father told me. In the 1950s he was a navigator for the Military Air Transport Service (MATS) flying out of Wheelus Air Base in Tripoli, Libya where our whole family lived. He was flying over the desert with a brand new Lieutenant that he was training. My father took a nap and told the Lieutenant to keep track of where they were. After a short while the Lieutenant shook my dad in a panic and said, “Peck, Peck, wake up I’ve lost track of where we are!” My dad, having flown the same route many times and was thus very familiar with the surrounding terrain, lifted his head, looked out the window, pointed to a place on the map, and said, “We’re right here.”