National Geographic’s cartographic department celebrated its 100th birthday recently. Here’s a look back at their work and some of NG’s most memorable maps.
The November 1988 map of Mount Everest, which took four years to produce, relied on a high-resolution camera carried on the Columbia space shuttle and 160 overlapping aerial images taken from a Learjet flying at 40,000 feet to map 380 square miles of the region.
A work of unearthly beauty, this 1969 map of the moon was the first ever to show both faces of the lunar surface on a single sheet—not just the familiar surface we see at night, but the hidden far side as well. Cartographic artist Tibor Toth, who delicately shaded the surface crater by crater, spent several weeks at the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, to scope out his subject.