Sinusoidal Gores

In the past few years, we've had clients looking to create custom globes for applications such as museum display and conference exhibit. The trick in these cases is to use a sinusoidal projection and produce a number of "gores" - segments of the Earth that run from pole to pole and are bound by two longitude lines. Here's an example using a "Natural Earth" color map:


(Click for higher res version).

For the projects mentioned above, we provided the individual gores at very high resolution. The clients then printed these out, cut along the borders and pasted them on to their globes. Since each gore runs pole to pole, its N-S length is 1/2 the circumference of the globe, or pi*r (where pi is 3.1415926535... and r is the globe radius.)

Since we're always up for a challenge at CTM, we decided to try this ourselves, with the image provided on this page. We printed the image at ~ 8.5x11", cut along the edges and taped it together as best we could, without any interior globe for support. And here's the result - apple shown for scale:


Try it yourself!