Get all the way through to the *final* episode of Stranger Things before there’s a Rush reference! 🤘🏻🎸🥁

This is what it would look like to fly over the Martian North Pole aboard @esa.int's Mars Express orbiter. This sequence of 117 images was captured by the VMC camera on June 14th, 2019 over the course of 3 hours and is played a 1200x speed. #planetsci Credit: ESA/Simeon Schmauß flic.kr/p/2rQAPdw

The roundup of the year from @flowingdata.com could be added: flowingdata.com/2025/12/31/b...

“Of all the media of cartography, color is probably the most complicated and the least understood.” – Arthur H. Robinson True 75 years ago, still true today.

Interesting to see support for the hypothesis that the rainbow palette isn’t inherently ordered (the colors don’t map to "more" or "less"). www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... #dataviz 📊 #color 🎨

Eight ways of smoothing/interpolating irregular data, and not one of them is a heat map. From Cartography by @kennethfield.bsky.social Here’s Ken’s discussion of heat maps, which are a type of statistical display: cartonerd.blogspot.com/2015/02/when...

I particularly like this one — not only for the jaunty uniforms, but also because it shows a distribution, not just an average, for each category. #dataviz 📊

Some of the recent videos released on my return to Youtube... youtube.com/seandoran/videos

3 January 1803 Newcastle-upon-Tyne: birth of geologist, surveyor & mining engineer Thomas Sopwith. He worked on the North Pennine Orefield, produced a teaching set of wooden models of geological structures, & accompanied & sketched William Buckland on a tour in search of glacial features in 1841.

Design + #dataviz 📊

Just after midnight on 1 January 2026, a new eruption started from #Etna's eastern flank: a fissure opened at ~2100 m elevation, and a lava flow is descending through the desert-like Valle del Bove. Photos taken in the evening of 1 January from Etna's east and southeast flanks

I'm going to do two sets of highlights from November - first are those taken with a drone (in #Iceland, obviously!). The first photo is probably my favourite of the whole year - it was one of the most exquisite things I've ever seen! #DronePhotography #DJIMavic3Pro #YearinReview

When an article says "some scientists think" then remember this: I, a scientist, once thought I could fit a whole orange in my mouth. I could, it turns out, get it in there, but I hadn't given sufficient thought to the reverse operation.

“What was your biggest impact on the internet?” Making the most accurate color image of Earth since Apollo program. science.nasa.gov/earth/earth-...

FYI!

My final written offering of year is a reflection from the @kqedscience.bsky.social team about stories that stuck with us this year. Read here: www.kqed.org/science/1999...

Happy New Year! 🎉 While the Data Vis Dispatch is still on holiday break, we’ve rounded up the best-of-2025 lists celebrating data journalism, visualizations, and the people behind them. See something we missed? Send it our way, and we’ll happily include it! www.datawrapper.de/blog/data-vi...

What's your fav national park (or monument)? Death Valley for me, hands down.

Fun dumbbell charts by @today.yougov.com via @pbump.com #dataviz 📊

🧪🛰️ Mt Michael 🌋 (S. Atlantic) shows an example of volcanic emissions making a cloud brighter by the same process that human air pollution change cloud reflective properties. This why it is of interest to study aerosols-cloud interactions. 1/n

#TodayinHistory #dataviz #Onthisday #OTD 📊 🎂Dec 28, 1804 Alexander Keith Johnston born in Kirkhill, Scotland 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 1843: Ethnographic maps showing distribution of ethnic groups throughout the world 1850: Atlas of distributions of plants

Artist friends, check out a fun paid opportunity!

Looks like Mars!

1. Peters ripped off Gall and took credit. Probably. 2. Peters pretended his was the first equal area map (It wasn't. At all) 3. Peters massively distorts shapes which are also important in geography! 4. His claims reduced geography to a false premise- that size is the only thing that matters.

📢 Do you want to do a #PhD using #hyperspectral satellite data to observe climate influences on tundra vegetation in Sweden? With me and @robertgbjork.bsky.social at U of Gothenburg. Apply by 19 Jan 2026. bit.ly/44duvJI

Poignant.

Have yourself a merry little Carboniferous. #Art #SciArt #PaleoArt #Inverts

This day 57 years ago. Earthrise. A remarkable view of Earth hoving into view as the Apollo 8 command module flew over the lunar surface. That's us. That's home.

Awesome! I’m looking forward to seeing more.

1/n 2 NEW epic images of Phobos over Mars just released by @esa.int Mars Express This view is especially striking, with Phobos between the Tharsis volcanoes and Noctis Labyrinthus–Valles Marineris Full resolution 300MP(!) & info on: flic.kr/p/2rMW4so Credit: ESA/DLR/FUBerlin/AndreaLuck CC BY 🧪🔭

How can the legacy of ancient Amazonian societies help the forest withstand climate change today? A new study presented at #AGU25 explains.

It’s interesting how #satellites can now photograph each other from space, turning anomalies into visible stories. The #satellite staying mostly intact suggests a quiet failure, not a dramatic breakup. #Space is harsh, and reentry like this is a normal part of the cycle. #Starlink 🛰🌍 📸X @vantortech

Baby landslide above Lake Chabot. I wonder if it’s just from the rain, or triggered by an #earthquake.

Two #earthquakes in 5 minutes. The Christmas tree is a very sensitive detector.

#dataviz 📊

Art x Climate is an integral part of the Fifth National Climate Assessment (NCA5), restored by Climate.us. One of the featured artworks is “San Francisco Air Quality Fall 2020” by Lorraine Woodruff-Long. Year and Medium: 2020, fiber

For all dedicated to craft and advancing our understanding of reality, 2025 wasn’t the most harmonious trip around the sun. Yet we stayed productive and strove to make things better. My top 5 essays according to my own capricious whim (and some studio notes): www.chartography.net/p/curiosity-...

Tule fog, Sutter Buttes, California. Captured by Sentinel-2C on December 14, 2025. 🛰️🖼️

I love the typeface used for the country labels.

After a day of dead-serious reporting on Trump's and Vought's attempted demolition of @ncar-acom.bsky.social, it's worth re-upping Woody Allen's 1973 "Sleeper" portrait of this climate research hub. The black and white photos are from NCAR's online archive (link is in my post below). #saveNCAR 🧪🌏

“In one of Roman’s planned sky surveys, the telescope will cover in nine months what would take Hubble between 1,000 and 2,000 years.” 🤯

Attendance at US-based science conferences is bouncing around this year but generally down. #AGU25 has ~10k fewer this year! I explored these trends for @nature.com — including solutions to keep conferences local & productive: www.nature.com/articles/d41... 🧪

I *just* noticed this detail in Cartography by @kennethfield.bsky.social & I literally LOLed (there may even be a few tears of laughter on my cheek right now). What a delightful easter egg.

Brilliant choice of bivariate color palette in this map of water stress from @wriclimate.bsky.social & ESRI. I love how it draws attention to areas with high demand for water with saturated colors, & distinguishes low & high availability with a striking change in hue. via @dantoearth.bsky.social

TODAY! 60th ANNIVERSARY of the world's first rendezvous in space! 🚀 Gemini VI-A and VII Human spaceFLIGHT? - Gemini is where it all began... Photos, incl Jim Lovell seen through the window of GT-7 from #GeminiAndMercuryRemastered

Looking back over the last 12 months, all latitude bands observed above average temperatures. This was largest in the Arctic region. Plot shows zonal-mean surface air temperature anomalies, where latitude = x-axis (not scaled by distance). Data from NASA GISTEMPv4 (1951-1980 baseline).

A very fine line! I’ve been writing a series of tutorials and I think as I get more familiar with the subject my tutorials are getting worse as I lose my feeling for which bits are hard for beginners.

Is anyone here from Perth, Australia? If you are, put a piece of bread on the ground. If I do it here in Ottawa, we’ll make the entire Earth into a sandwich. That’s gotta set a record.