How do you map something 238,856 miles away? You can’t just send out a team of surveyors. At least, you couldn’t until relatively recently. Before then, lunar cartographers (technically, selenographers) could only rely on telescopes and their own artistic ability to draw a detailed portrait of the lunar face. They managed some pretty dazzling results.

One of the first widely seen images of the moon (aside from the IRL version), the drawing at left was included by Galileo in a book published in 1610. While he didn’t technically map the moon, these observations were among the first to take note that the moon was not a perfect smooth magic sky-ball [...]

In the last Fun With Maps, we talked about a Pennsylvania congressman drawn out of his own district by mere yards. Though that's a particularly targeted example of gerrymandering, it's certainly not the most egregious. Let's look at some of the most rigged.

The Horseshoe: IL-04

To create a Hispanic-majority district in the Chicagoland suburbs, the state of Illinois combined a Puerto Rican neighborhood with a distant Mexican neighborhood via a nonresidential strip of Interstate 294. The problem? The highway is eight miles west of either enclave.

Chester A. Arthur gets a lot of flak. He deserves most of it. If you're president, you really shouldn't sell off wagonloads of priceless White House furniture at auction. But one accomplishment of Arthur's presidency that gets glossed over in favor of criticism of the “he owned eighty pairs of pants!” closet-shaming variety is that he convened the International Meridian Conference of 1884, with the goal of nailing down "exactly what time is it, anyway?" Although Arthur, I’m sure, put it in much more elegant terms.

The International Meridian Conference designated the Greenwich Meridian as the prime meridian for "time reckoning throughout the world" (it was already the [...]

Is Colorado a perfect rectangle? The borders are defined by strict latitude and longitude lines, so by all accounts it should be; but thanks to a surveyor error back in 1879, it isn’t. The kink in the western side of America’s Otherwise Squariest Landmass is just one example of the kind of cartographic aberrations that have made for oddball borders in today's United States. Kalawao, HI Hawaii is composed of five counties: four counties of comparable size and one 13-square-mile blip, Kalawao County. This small size is because Kalawao County (on the island of Molokaʻi) governs the Kalaupapa Leprosy Settlement and National Historical Park and nothing else. The two even [...]

The infamous Grenada invasion of 1983 was, in addition to everything else that went wrong, hindered by a wildly out-of-date British map. The map predated the construction of the Richmond Hill Insane Asylum, and in the resulting air strikes the hospital was bombed and a number of patients and staff members killed.

Welcome to the world of cartographic errors, misjudgments and deceptions. Sometimes it's the map that's wrong—sometimes the blame lies with the map's reader. For example, back in 1988, the Philippine media announced that neighboring Malaysia had taken ownership of a group of six small islands in the south of the country. The Turtle Islands, small and [...]