NASA Just Released The Greatest Ever Picture Of Indonesia

For most of our lives, we're used to seeing Indonesia on the map as a string of tiny islands sandwiched between the massive continents of Eurasia and Australia, but in reality Indonesia a lot bigger than we think. NASA has recently released a incredible photo showing the true grandeur of Indonesia.

Because of it's location on the equator and unique weather patterns, it's rare to find an opportunity to take a picture that clearly shows the islands of Indonesia without any cloud cover.

Seeing their chance for a clear picture, the crew living aboard the International Space Station (ISS) took this massive shot of Indonesia. The images shows Indonesia's expansive archipelago stretching from Java to as far as Timor along the horizon.

You can clearly see numerous volcanoes that dot the ring of fire which runs along Indonesia. Even thought they were all the way in outer space, they were only able to capture less than half of all the islands in Indonesia.

The photograph shows the true scale of how massive the Indonesian archipelago really is. Common perceptions of Indonesia, built on school textbooks, refers to the Mercator Projection. A worldwide standard in map projection that has been popular since 1569, mostly due to its common usage in naval trade. Many critics has deemed the Mercator Projection a misrepresentation of the true scale of continents, with Europe and North America being much larger than they actually are, while Africa and Asia are much smaller.

In 1973, German scientist Arno Peters created a new map projection; it soon was adapted by the United Nations as the official world map. The Gall-Peters Projection, while accurate in its representation of the earth, is still widely unpopular in commercial and academic usage. During its conception, the projection was widely disputed by the global cartographic community, mostly due to an internal battle about who first discovered the theory.

Cartographic political problems aside, we have NASA to thank for the awesome photograph that helps us see that Indonesia is not just some small string of islands.