Dune (1965)
Summary
Several factions jostle for control of the planet Arrakis and its prized resource, 'spice'.
My Thoughts
I read this before it was cool to read it. Just kidding, like everyone else I read it after they announced it would be made into a film with Timothee Chalamet. Dune has a strong first and second act with top-tier worldbuilding. For me it fell flat in the last quarter or so of the book, enough so that I wasn't that interested in reading the rest of the series. Endings are tough to write.
Map
What else to make a map of than dunes. Luckily we have some pretty good ones right here on Earth. There's also no public dataset for the planet Arrakis so I didn't have much of a choice (maybe Mars has dunes?) The dunes in this map come from coastal Namibia which has some of the tallest dunes in the world. I wanted to get practice with a couple new PyGMT functions so I decided to make an elevation profile across a series of dunes.
Coding Notes
Data used in the maps come from PyGMT's built in earth relief dataset. This was a pure PyGMT script, no other libraries were used. This was my first time using the 'project' and 'grdtrack' functions. The 'project' function takes in coordinates and an interval. Then it returns a pandas DataFrame containing the two coordinates as the first and last values in the DataFrame, and interpolates points between them at the interval you set. The 'grdtrack' function takes in the elevation grid and the points generated from 'project', and appends an 'elevation' column to the DataFrame generated by 'project'. This gives you enough data to plot a smooth elevation profile between your two coordinates.