Another idea for folk who want to generate equally spaced points on a sphere for things like this - a while back I did an answer on codegolf.stackexchange: http

Another idea for folk who want to generate equally spaced points on a sphere for things like this - a while back I did an answer on codegolf.stackexchange: http://codegolf.stackexchange.com/a/24961/16869 http://codegolf.stackexchange.com/a/24961/16869 for showing a daylight map of the earth. You need to store a map of the earth to do this, but I didn't want to waste storage on the poles as you would with most projections, and couldn't be bothered calculating tilings; so the path I took was to use a spiral sampling of the surface of the earth giving approximately equal area, then flood filling. I hadn't seen this approach before, but guessed someone would have thought of it so hunted down a discussion; The spiral I used is taken from here: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/sci.math/CYMQX7HO1Cw/tFhJvkWHSjUJ https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/sci.math/CYMQX7HO1Cw/t... (see the rest of the thread, their motivation is minimising the potential energy of charged particles on the sphere).