4 ms·

It's an orbit map (showing nadir of the orbiter).

• ge96 10y ago
  I see thanks for the clarification. I guess I don't get why it would be an S shape even if it's a perfect-circle orbit or an ellipse flattened out (side view). Yeah I'll have to read up on that. edit: not sure if this is related, I remember doing this thing when I was a kid, you'd spin a globe and trace a pencil straight down (a lonitude line) and it spiral out (the drawn line). To simulate Coriolis effect edit: Oh I see depends on what it's aligned to, (equator) to create the sinusoidal look... reminds me in calc or engineering creating diagrams/charts (maybe beams and moment/force diagrams) ahhh... sucks when you don't use something and you forget. In calc you did something with max/mins and this determined the concave/convex of a curve on a graph. Ahhh rambling sorry.
  • planteen 10y ago
    There's also lots of distortion due to the equirectangular projection. When you are at +/- 90 degrees, 1 pixel is being stretched across the entire width. It would look more natural if it was mapped on a sphere. Or if the 2D image dropped off width by cosine of latitude.