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 [...]

Growing up, my family went on a lot of car trips. A lot of them. Along with our trusty steed, the maroon minivan, my mom, sister and I journeyed all around the country, from Death Valley to Cape Cod, Yellowstone to Galveston, and as many points as we could hit in between. My interest in geography came, in large part, from my role as a navigator on these trips. Examining road maps and AAA guides, I came to appreciate a good highway. Here are seven roads that I believe are worth building a dream road trip around; some of them I've already visited, some are definitely in my future. [...]

The infamous Grenada invasion of 1983 was, in addition to everything else that went wrong, hindered by a wildly out-of-date British map.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 [...]

View Mass Animal Deaths in a larger map Having a hard time keeping track of the Great Planetary Die-Off? Good news! This handy map will help you stay current on all of the signs of the forthcoming apocalypse. But what does it all mean? Here are some possible answers. [Via]

You probably did not think you needed an interactive Google map of the forgotten Sir Mix-a-Lot classic "Posse On Broadway," but you so do. [Via]

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 [...]

Have you seen that episode of "The West Wing"? This is a Fun with Maps column, so you know which one I mean. The one where it's Big Block of Cheese Day, and CJ meets with the Organization of Cartographers for Social Equality? If that's not ringing any bells, here's what happens: the organization is promoting an alternative to the Mercator projection, that is, the version of the world map with which you're probably most familiar—it's the one that has Greenland as roughly the same size as Africa. The group would prefer the Peters projection be used, because it doesn't exaggerate the size of Europe and North America at [...]

Greenland is ice, Iceland is nice—and Carcass Island is full of penguins. In this installment, let's investigate some of the more suspicious-sounding islands out there and see whether they live up to their altogether uninviting toponyms.

Name: Deception Island Location: The South Shetland Islands off the Antarctic Peninsula Does it live up to its name? Yes. Deception Island is a nearly perfect circle with a small inlet leading to a geothermal bay—a researcher from SUNY-Geneseo describes it as "a donut with a small bite taken out." The entrance is almost completely obscured; you can only find your way in if you know precisely where to go. Also, [...]

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Here is a map of where the 8,862 (and counting!) newspaper jobs that have disappeared thus far this year are clustered. Actually, "clustered" is a bit imprecise. Either way, expect to see Boston get a little darker very soon.