foldable map of Itokawa, a cook's tour of the sausage factory Options

[chuckclark]

Not that I mean to compare Itokawa to a sausage, just to show you behind the scenes of making the map, along with the map itself, here, rather than continue to clog up the Hayabusa Return to Earth thread.
Here is the map itself, so far along as the pasting in of the mosaic has gone.
And here is are two shots of the folded up map, compared with the computer-made model. Note the arrow to one of the "ears." The first try of the map failed to capture the ear, so I replotted the boundary, as seen in the Tracing image.
All photos credit: Sara Adkins Studio

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[chuckclark]

Here are the tabs I'm gonna try this time -- I neglected to keep track of the tabs I used to fold up the grid-only map.
The general rule I use when deciding whether to cut on the map-edge or leave a tab attached is to begin at any random "spot," i.e., the triple junctions (solid circles marked by letters) and the hinge points (open circles marked by numbers), and then switch (from cutting map-edge to leaving a tab) when I arrive at the next "spot."
This give a nice interweaving of tabs when assembling, and it seems to work out automatically, so you don't have to strain to think too far ahead about which edge will eventually match with which edge. This alternating tab-or-edge scissoring method means that there are basically only two possible tab layouts -- this always surprises me, but perhaps it is not news to mathematicians? One may be preferable over the other when it comes to assembling the tricky parts, the neck and the two, right-side "ears." Or the tab-and-edge rule may be better not followed in these areas; we don't know yet.
When cutting edges and tabs, check yourself where it's easy to do, though; it took me an hour or so to cut this out, and if I had missed a spot-changeover, then during assembly things would be all fouled up -- tabs matching tabs and no tabs matching no tabs -- not a fun outcome.
Seam slices -- to use Emily's vividly descriptive phrase -- are NOT shown. I'll use this cutout to keep track of minimum required slices and re-post it.
I can do that because I'm learning the hard way not to print (11x17 size, by the way, in case you lost track) the image on standard color-copy paper. It's too shiny for Scotch tape to stick well; I have to print and cut out another.

Be patient, that's gonna take me a few days because my good printer (Canon i9900) is on the blitz -- color is all screwed up and I'm at a loss how to fix it. I pinched pennies on my last ink cartridge order, going for the less-expensive Canon-compatible inks. I now have a mix of Canon and generic in it, which may be the source of my problem; or maybe the photo inks are fugitive, and -- I temporarily had the printer set up where it got afternoon sun -- the inks got bleached? Then again, maybe I have to haul it into the shop. Anybody have any experience with this?

By the way, since many of the hinge points (the numbered points) swing very narrow arcs, I had to place the numbers far up-stream of the points themselves. Other option was to shrink the font to ultra-teeny and put it in the open circles, but then unreadable. Why do you need them? The cylindrical map is marked correspondingly, so the numbers (and letters) help with orientation if you find yourself working back and forth from the conventional projection and the constant-scale natural boundary projection.

And, one final tip, when cutting into those narrow-arc hinge points: forget the alternating tab-and-edge rule; cut whichever side is easiest. I hold scissors in my right hand, so I cut the left side (working toward the hinge point) of the boundary. I see what I'm cutting rather than cutting blind.

Photo credit: Sara Adkins Studio / C. Clark

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