MAYONRAJAN

The Perfect Cone · 2,463 m · Bicol, Philippines

drag to orbit · scroll to zoom · double-click to travel · slide the sun

INSIDE MAYON · translucent forms are inferred volcanic plumbing, not directly imaged chambers.

MAYON · RA · RAJA

One name, three suns: Mayon, the perfect cone of Bicol — Ra, the sun that sails over it — Raja, the king it resembles. A radiant king of volcanoes, at true scale.

2,463 m — from rice paddy to summit in under 10 km. Everything here is 1 unit = 1 metre.
The perfect cone — Mayon's near-flawless symmetry comes from ~50 eruptions since 1616 layering lava and ash evenly.
Daragang Magayon — "beautiful maiden" in Bikol. Legend says the mountain is the burial mound of the princess Magayon.
1814 — the deadliest eruption buried Cagsawa; its lone church belfry is Bicol's most famous ruin.
The fourth dimension — slide the sun to move through the day; the era chips move you through two centuries.
Places — Daraga, Legazpi, Camalig, Tabaco, and the Cagsawa belfry stand at their true coordinates. Double-click anywhere to travel.
The sound — wind, birds, the mountain's rumble, and now and then a flute over the paddies: Ra sailing, Raja fluting. All of it synthesized live — no recordings.

Built with WebGL. Terrain relief: NASA SRTM via AWS Terrain Tiles. Imagery: Esri World Imagery — © Esri, Maxar, Earthstar Geographics, and the GIS User Community. Sky, plume, palms: procedural.