The same data can also be viewed as a pdf file. Here each of the cones is represented as an polygon, and labled dashed circles give visual eccentricity again. This pdf file is also large, and will take some time to load. Generally the detail can best be viewed a maximum or near maximum magnification of your pdf viewer.
The 13.6 MB file linked to below contains a little less than 400 thousand cones (the central most 7% of our data), out to a little over 11° of eccentricity. Newer pdf viewer versions (7.0) allow the zoom factor to be set as high as 6400%; this is a good setting to see the fine details of this file. The center most cone is colored black, all the other cones are colored corresponding to their type (red for L, green for M, and blue for S). The white gaps between the cones at low eccentricities are just the cone boarders, but after the first 0.5° the white areas also start to represent where the rods would be if we were placing them too. The dashed black circles mark off unit degrees of eccentricity; the length of each dash is set to exactly 10 microns for scale. (The circles were generated as pdf at the same time and from the same data as the cones, so their position is quite accurate.) The change in the density and the regularity of the packing order can be easily seen by panning through this image, but subtile detail (such as the slightly higher cone density about the horizontal meridian) are harder to verify visually. One thing that is easy to see in this file is our current bug in occasionally generating two blue cones far too close to one another.
retinalCones.pdf (14 MB)