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Shooting down a floating balloon out on its lonesome seems like a straightforward task. It’s just a balloon after all. But it seemed to take a while to get that Chinese spy balloon down. For The Washington Post, William Neff, Leslie Shapiro and Dylan Moriarty explained the challenges and timing behind the task.
Tags: balloon, China, military, Washington Post
Posted by in balloon, china, Infographics, military, Washington Post
For The New York Times, Eleanor Lutz illustrated things in the sky, because there are other objects up there other than spy balloons and UFOs. A long vertical scale is used to represent altitude. Bonus points for moving the objects around to give a floating effect.
Tags: balloon, Eleanor Lutz, illustration, New York Times, UFO
Posted by in balloon, Eleanor Lutz, illustration, Infographics, New York Times, UFO
I wasn’t paying much attention to the Chinese balloon that the U.S. shot down — until this graphic by JoElla Carman for NBC News floated by. The balloon was 200 feet tall, which makes the Thanksgiving parade Snoopy balloon look tiny and about equivalent to the wingspan of a Boeing 747.
Posted by in balloon, Infographics, NBC News, scale
There was a time when the best way to get a view from above was to hop into a hot air balloon, which eventually led to the so-called “balloon map.” Cara Giaimo for Atlas Obscura starts the story with a ballooner named Thomas Baldwin.
In an age of transatlantic flights and Google Earth, Baldwin’s suggestions seem a bit quaint. But in his time, when almost everyone was stuck on the ground, Baldwin’s attempts to pin down an accurate sky-view were heroic. Over the following century, entrepreneurs, military spies, and tourist boards alike would follow his lead, transforming some of the world’s most vital views into lovely, quirky “balloon maps.”
Hand-drawn, detailed maps and graphics like this — before computers — always blows my mind.