Atmospheric halo effect around mollweide projection of earth

Question

Looking for a tool or cartographic trick to create a halo effect around an image of the earth that I'm using in a global pathways map. The projection is Mollweide, because I want something of an "earth from space" look but still capturing all the continents. Therefore I cannot use ArcGlobe or some other 3D mapping program.

I've tried buffering an envelope of the earth (error due to exceeding max bnd), graduated fills of ellipses with custom color ramps, large stack of line widths to simulate buffer/halo, etc. Nothing I've tried so far achieves the effect I want. I've searched ArcGIS Online and arcscripts but haven't found anything.

Any ideas?

JimW1 · Answer

I'll expand on what I did, since Jim is being so darn cryptic 😛

1.) Display imagery with transparent background (the default)
2.) Draw an ellipse in layout that is larger than the imagery
3.) In the ellipse properties -> Choose Symbol... -> Edit Symbol... -> Type = Gradient Fill Symbol
4.) Choose a color ramp that fades to black. 'OK' your way back to the layout
5.) Send the ellipse back so you can see it and the imagery
6.) Draw a big black rectangle and send it to the back

100% ArcMap

Oh I wrote it all out in steps and then the forum crashed and was too lazy to re-write 🙂
If anyone stumbles accross this post then Darren is bang on with his process steps. The only thing I would add is to anchor everything to the centre point as it makes sizing easier with circles and ellipses.

I use the variant of this method to give an eye-glass look to circular inset maps. It's a shame they haven't updated the transparency export capabilities in 10 or added something as simple as feathering edges.

This is the kind of thread I hope the Cartography forum expands into where we can really get down to making some good looking maps. It's a shame that most of us likely do not have IP or publishing rights on our own work otherwise we could post some examples of cool tricks.

DarrenWiens2 · Answer

I'll expand on what I did, since Jim is being so darn cryptic 😛

1.) Display imagery with transparent background (the default)
2.) Draw an ellipse in layout that is larger than the imagery
3.) In the ellipse properties -> Choose Symbol... -> Edit Symbol... -> Type = Gradient Fill Symbol
4.) Choose a color ramp that fades to black. 'OK' your way back to the layout
5.) Send the ellipse back so you can see it and the imagery
6.) Draw a big black rectangle and send it to the back

100% ArcMap

earth_halo.jpg

JimW1 · Answer

Friday Afternoon Challenge Accepted

This is a variation on a technique I use to make another projection have the halo effect. See Attached.

It needs about 20 minutes more of fine-tuning but this isn't my map 🙂

I'll share my technique if this is what you're looking to do.

99.5% ArcMap
0.5% MS-Paint

The BING raster screws up the export (hence the MS-Paint) but if you have vector data it works great. See Second Attached (100% ArcMap) - had to make sure it worked in mollweide and it's only a 150dpi jpeg.

halo_test_vectors.jpg

halotest.PNG