EqualGlobeOpen the map

Where this map's numbers actually come from

Built for anyone who wants to verify a figure, cite this map in a piece, or just understand what's underneath it. Every claim on this page is checked against the code that builds the map, not written from memory.

1:50mthe scale of the Natural Earth outlines, public domain
294states and provinces you can compare, in nine countries
10worlds to visit, from the Sun out to Neptune

Last updated 14 September 2026.

Countries and boundaries

Country outlines come from Natural Earth's 1:50m admin-0 countries dataset (public domain), pulled fresh from Natural Earth's own repository each time the map is rebuilt, not frozen to one dated release.

Boundary policy is Natural Earth's own de facto lines, not an editorial judgement made here. A handful of limited-recognition or contested territories, Western Sahara, Kosovo, Palestine, Northern Cyprus and Somaliland, are drawn with a dashed outline instead of a solid one and labelled as such. Flags are shown for the first three; Northern Cyprus and Somaliland deliberately aren't given one, since a flag itself would be the contested part.

States and provinces

Where you can compare below the country level, Texas against France, say, that's Natural Earth's 1:50m admin-1 states and provinces dataset, also public domain. Natural Earth only maps this level of detail for nine larger countries; that's their coverage limit, not a choice made here. 294 units in total:

294Australia (9), Brazil (27), Canada (13), China (31), India (36), Indonesia (33), Russia (85), South Africa (9), United States (51).

Cities and population

4,235 populated places, from Natural Earth's 1:10m populated places dataset (public domain), power search results and city cards.

Country populations come from that same Natural Earth countries dataset, its own population estimate field, not a separate census pull. They're estimates, current only as of Natural Earth's own data, not a live feed.

How area is calculated

Every country’s area on this map, Greenland’s fourteen times smaller than it looks among them, is computed on the sphere: the real geodesic area of each outline, not pixels measured off a flat projection. That order matters. The numbers never depended on the drawing, which is the whole reason an equal-area map can be trusted here rather than just asserted.

There are two exceptions, where a published figure is the better answer. Africa as a whole is given everywhere as 30.37 million km², the figure atlases and encyclopedias use; its countries’ outlines on this map add up to 29.99 million, a little less, as simplified 1:50m coastlines measured on a sphere tend to. And the oceans: where one ocean ends and the next begins, and which seas count toward which, is a convention rather than a coastline, so their areas are the published figures (Encyclopedia of Earth, International Hydrographic Organization, Encyclopædia Britannica, as tabulated on Wikipedia's Ocean article), adding up to about 361.9 million km².

Street-level maps

Zoom in past country level and real street data comes up under the globe: OpenStreetMap (ODbL, © OpenStreetMap contributors), as OpenMapTiles vector tiles served by OpenFreeMap at no charge, credited in the corner of the map while it shows. No Google Maps, no Mapbox, no metered API of any kind, a deliberate choice covered on the Roadmap.

Satellite texture

The optional satellite skin (Scene menu) is NASA's Blue Marble: Land Surface, Ocean Color and Sea Ice, a true-colour composite built from MODIS observations aboard the Terra satellite, public domain. It's a photograph of the planet, not a live feed: nothing about where you are or when you're looking changes what it shows.

The other worlds

Each world’s globe and flat map is a photo wrapped on the same sphere maths as the Earth’s, from the sources below. The measures on each card (size, day, year, tilt, gravity, moons, distance, temperature) are NASA’s published planetary fact sheets. Where a photo is an illustration rather than a mosaic of real images, the card says so.

Named places and their positions come from the IAU’s Gazetteer of Planetary Nomenclature, kept by USGS Astrogeology (public domain), checked by pinning each one on the map the app draws; Venus’s radar map arrived 60° out of that frame and was turned into it. Landing and impact sites are from NASA’s mission records. On the giants nothing is fixed: a storm’s longitude is where it sits on that map, and only its latitude is the planet’s own.

Relief on the rocky worlds is shaded from their height maps, all public domain and drawn five times steeper than it is so it shows on a whole-planet globe: MESSENGER’s DEM for Mercury and Magellan’s topography for Venus (USGS Astrogeology), LOLA for the Moon (NASA’s CGI Moon Kit), and MOLA for Mars (NASA’s Planetary Data System). Each was checked by finding its known highest or lowest point where it should be.

NASA JPL’s approximate orbital elements (E. M. Standish, valid 1800 to 2050) place the planets in the solar system scene, to a fraction of a degree; the IAU’s rotation elements (2015) turn each one on its axis. The Moon goes round the Earth at its mean longitude. The planets are drawn bigger than life, by a factor the scene states, except when True size is on.

The four other dwarf planets (Ceres, Haumea, Makemake and Eris) come from JPL’s Small-Body Database, and the moons bigger than Pluto (Jupiter’s four, Saturn’s Titan, Neptune’s Triton) from JPL’s Horizons system, each on a steady orbit from one recent position: near enough for a dot beside its world, not for navigation. With Jupiter, Saturn or Neptune in view, the planets are drawn nearer their true size, so those moons show on their real orbits.

The stars behind every view are real: the 9,096 of the Yale Bright Star Catalogue (Hoffleit and Warren, 5th revised edition, 1991, from NASA’s HEASARC), every star the eye can see on a dark night, each where it really is, as bright and as coloured as it is. The fainter stars behind them are drawn to gather toward the Milky Way as the faint stars really do, and the Milky Way is painted along the galaxy’s real plane, with the Great Rift and the two Magellanic Clouds.

The constellations, when they’re switched on, are the stick figures of the 88 the International Astronomical Union recognises, with their Latin names, from Olaf Frohn’s d3-celestial (BSD licence).

Open data

Every country’s true area and how much Mercator enlarges it, as worked out for this map, free to use for anything (public domain, CC0):

countries.csvcountries.json

Areas are in km², computed on a sphere of the Earth’s authalic radius from Natural Earth’s 1:50m outlines. The Mercator figure is how many times its true size Mercator draws an area at the country’s middle latitude.

Citing this map

Any suggested form works, but a stable one:

EqualGlobe. The world at its true size [Equal Earth map]. https://www.equalglobe.com

Citing a specific view (a comparison, a projection, a place) rather than the map in general? Copy the address bar, it's not a generic homepage link once you've moved from the resting view: everything you're looking at, the projection, the selected country, a comparison, lives in the URL itself.

The world at its true size.

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