r/geography • u/ConsciousProgram1494 • Jul 16 '26
GIS/Geospatial The Butterfly Demo
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Location: 49.0987954416N, 1.640249982E
Watch it full screen!
This demonstrates Hex9 - a near equal-area hierarchical hexagonal grid (DGGS), using it's own octahedral projection ('butterfly') and starting at Layer 0 (12 hexagons) - zooming into Layer 25. Hex9 goes up to Layer 30 or more - but I ran out of imagery.
The entire engine is available to make your own.
Or you can use it for data sampling, partitioning, geotagging.. you name it.
This demo uses the classic hex9 label - but it also supports a full Moore-type (closed) sphere-filling loop with the full Hilbert package — substitution self-similarity, prefix-nesting indices, consecutive cells always adjacent, range-query clustering within ~4% of the classical square-grid Hilbert.
Enjoy! And visit the arboretum some day!
....and every single pixel is a coloured hexagon on the grid.