Four years. That’s how long I’ve been working on these maps. My first “commit” to the git-repository that set me on this journey, a tool for calculating and performing projections from one projection to another, was on December 31st 2012 [0], but I remember that I started working on the code in October or November. Any way — Four years! A lot can happen in four years. I’ve changed jobs twice, and am now working with maps as part of my work as a software developer. This is not something that I would have expected, but it is welcome, and I really do feel that what I’ve learned by mapping Tau Ceti has helped me with my work. Thinking about the balance of aesthetics and information content, the merits and drawbacks of different projections — these are important considerations for what I do today. I’m still an amateur in the field, but an amateur with some confidence built from experience, and who knows something of what questions to ask, even if I don’t have the answers. Four years is also the time that Dr Grijndvar has been away on an extended expedition across the Atlantic, but he returned safe and sound yesterday — welcome home, dear friend!
So what have I learnt, and what have I done all this time? Before getting to that, I would like to start with my usual advice to the reader, that this text is very long and mostly written for my own sake: should you wish to skip directly to the maps, then please do so – no hard feelings! I have also compiled a list of the tools I have used at the end of this article, which may be of interest to some – all are free (as in free speech) and open source, and available for anyone to download and use.
grijndvar
Stian Rødven Eide
quantacat
skymandr
Eintritt Verboten 