Optical Illusion (original) (raw)

St. Helena 201-204

St. Helena issued a set of four stamps in 1968 to mark the 30th anniversary of Tristan da Cunha as a dependency of St. Helena. There are two designs in the set, but both designs use the same maps. St. Helena is 46 square miles in area, and Tristan is 38 square miles. While they are not drawn to the same scale, they are pretty close.
The shape of Tristan's volcano is seen clearly, but on the map of St. Helena, what appears to be a depression in the middle of the island is actually Mt. Actaeon which rises to 820 feet above sea level. In fact, the mountain on which Edmund Halley had his observatory in 1676, approximately where the arrow points.