While at the Mountain Cartography workshop in Colorado last week I got to see a raft of spectacular maps. Chief among them in my opinion was this spectacular map by Eric Knight. It depicts the Tien Shan mountain range of central Asia as a panorama meaning it’s almost planimetric towards the near view at the foot of the map, with a gentle curve toward the horizon. The mountain peaks therefore become seen in almost aspect (plan oblique).
The map is huge, at about 60in across, and the detail is exquisite. The use of colour and texture delineates all sorts of varied terrain, and the labels sit unobtrusively among the features.
There’s lots of small touches I really like such as the globe locator map with field of view in the bottom left, the use of leader lines on the horizon to locate mountain peaks, the gentle curve left to right on the horizon to give a sense of scale by including the curvature of the Earth, and the sun glints on many of the water bodies.
Check out a hi-res version of this map (and Eric’s other work) at his web site here.