The azimuthal orthographic is thousands of years old. In the first century, Ptolemy described how a geographer named Hipparchus used the projection, which he called the analemma, to map the globe.

Known as a "planisphere," the map is aligned in a “north polar azimuthal projection,” meaning that the North Pole is at its center. When he published his work in a four-volume, ...

Map views of P-wave azimuthal anisotropic velocity tomography. The orientation and length of the black bars represent the fast velocity direction and amplitude of azimuthal anisotropy, respectively.