HN Explorer

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thesis
I really don't know much about this stuff. Why is that orb not round at all? Is the earth really like that? When you look at earth from space, it looks nothing like that.

Edit: I understand mountains and things make it not round, but the perspective of the image makes it look like it's be from space as well. So I guess that's what I'm trying to compare it too

devb
It's an exaggerated portrayal of the differences in Earth's gravitational field, not a depiction of the actual shape of the Earth.
ryanklee
It isn't an exaggerated portrayal, it's a realistic portrayal.
Mystalic
Geoid measurements aren't a measurement of what the earth's surface actually looks like, but what it looks like mathematically through gravitational measurements. Because the Earth's uneven distribution of mass, the object never looks like a sphere (although to be clear, the Earth is actually oblate spheroid -- it's like someone sat on a ball just a little bit, and that ball is bulging at its sides).

Additional reading if you're interested: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Figure_of_the_Earth#Geoid http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoid

Mz
It looks to me like it is a depiction of the earth minus the water. I imagine it's pretty accurate. When I did my certificate in GIS, we spent some time on the fact that different types/standards of maps are better suited to different types of data presentation in part due to the irregularities in the earth's shape. It's not actually perfectly round, even with the water. This makes it quite challenging to accurately map the surface, which is challenging to begin with simply from the perspective of matching 3D reality to a 2D data set.
verysimple
This wikipedia article shed some light, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoid, but yes that seems to be a more accurate depiction of the physical Earth.

Pictures of planets taken from outter space, usually also capture the gases trapped by their gravity (athmosphere). It gives you a nice round shape.