Copyright © Joe Honton 2013
JavaScript Orthographic Earth (JOE) is an object-oriented library of packages, features, and visualizations for rendering global maps of the world where an entire hemisphere is visible.
Orthographic projections have faithful angles near the point of perspective, but have distorted areas, which become increasingly severe near the horizons.
A representation of Earth drawn by the JOE library can be programmatically rotated and tilted to use any place on Earth as the tangent of the projection, providing an undistorted rendering near that place. It is ideal for displaying continents, oceans and the polar regions.