On top of the world
Based in the historic Dominion Observatory in Kelburn’s Botanic Gardens, Geographx director Roger Smith describes the endeavour as “a truly international effort” that has been a major project for his team.
“We coordinated with dozens of cartographers in six continents to make the maps and also developed the relief mapping, the colour and textural backgrounds, oceans and seas for the entire atlas,” says Smith.
He says that the team’s Kiwi No 8 wire abilities very much came to the fore during the often complicated process.
“Absolutely nothing was straightforward. The IT challenges were the most significant. The file sizes were massive as they contained a great deal of data and complex relief images,” Smith says.
The largest files the team used were in-house Photoshop files that came in around 14 gigabytes each . (A downloaded movie - illegal now - would be around 4 gigabytes).
Smith will present a paper on ‘The Making of the World’s Biggest Atlas’ to the Surveyors and Spatial Sciences Conference 2011 at the Town Hall on Thursday.
Just 31 copies of Earth Platinum are to be published and each copy costs US$100,000.
The Making of the World’s Biggest Atlas, Town Hall, November 24.










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