Wikipedia:Featured picture candidates/D-Day position map

D-Day position map edit

Original - Official U.S. Twelfth Army situation map for 2400 hours, 6 June 1944.

Reason: Once in a while an archival find stands out from the rest. Here's the official (declassified) U.S. Twelfth Army position map from D-Day, showing the intelligence as it was available to headquarters at the end of the day. When WMF's new servers come online I hope to upload the full scale version (it's 109MB in .tif). Restoration of Image:D-Day 50 Pence Coin.jpg.
Articles this image appears in: Normandy Landings, D-Day
Creator: U.S. Twelfth Army Group

Support as nominator --Durova^Charge! 02:38, 6 August 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Comment. Could the fading of the map towards the bottom left be corrected? Also, why is it curved? Is that from the photography, warping of the page, or was the actual map printed like that? Can it be corrected without making things look even weirder? (And if that gets corrected, the left and right borders could probably be cropped; I assume they were left on to de-emphasize the curvature.)--ragesoss (talk) 06:01, 6 August 2008 (UTC)[reply]
- The shape of the map reflects the curvature of the earth. With regard to the slight fading at lower left, I've actually done a great deal of work at the pixel level in terms of reconstructing letters, redrawing longitude and latitude lines, etc. That was difficult to execute to perfection with a few of the smaller village names. Bear in mind that this version is downsampled due to the Commons upload limit, which should be remedied in the next couple of months, and I'll be uploading the full version as soon as possible. All of the place names are legible in the full version. Durova^Charge! 07:26, 6 August 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  - On second thought, I've gone into it again and put more work into that area. Uploaded over the existing file because the changes are subtle. Durova^Charge! 07:42, 6 August 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Support. Interesting, encyclopedic, well-restored.--ragesoss (talk) 19:25, 6 August 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Support per ragesoss. Mostlyharmless (talk) 04:38, 10 August 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Support Mfield (talk) 17:26, 11 August 2008 (UTC)[reply]
I like it very much, but I'm wondering if it would be more encyclopedically useful to just show a detail - crop it with a line to the west of the Cotentin peninsula and one just west of Le Havre, then cut across above Cherbourg and have the bottom somewhere around the Granville-Vire line? This gets all the "action", but means we don't confuse the viewer with a lot of empty space. (In terms of context, we can certainly make it clear it is simply an extract and not the map itself) Shimgray | talk | 18:12, 12 August 2008 (UTC) [adding: like this?[reply]
- Cropping might be worth doing at particular articles. The scale is located at the bottom of the map, though, so we'd lose significant data. Also, this is one of a series of maps showing daily troop positions as they were known to Allied headquarters at the time. So if anyone gets sufficiently ambitious it would be possible to restore and host an entire image set on the Normandy invasion. I think for the featured version it's best to display the entire document, as true to its original appearance as we can make it. Durova^Charge! 18:35, 12 August 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  - A series? Ooooh, exciting. Somewhat irrelevantly, do you have a detailed map of the planned landing positions, out of interest? I'd be interested to have a look at it - I was trying to track one down for the British sectors a year or two ago (to confirm a detail in an article) but couldn't find one that was more detailed than brigade-level. Shimgray | talk | 19:04, 12 August 2008 (UTC)[reply]
    - Well, the Library of Congress does have a large selection of historic maps. I doubt this collection would be the most accurate source available, since its particular value is that it was the best intelligence available to HQ at the time when command decisions were made. Durova^Charge! 19:56, 12 August 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Support Looks nice. Spencer^T♦^C 14:26, 13 August 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Promoted Image:D-Day5.jpg MER-C 04:07, 15 August 2008 (UTC)[reply]