A new method to subdivide a spherical surface into equal-area cells
  A new method is proposed to divide a spherical surface into equal-area cells. The method is based on dividing a sphere into several latitudinal bands of near-constant span with further division of each band into equal-area cells. It is simple in construction and provides more uniform latitude step be-tween latitudinal bands than other methods of isolatitudinal equal-area tessellation of a spherical surface. 
Zinovy Malkin
astro-ph.IM physics.geo-ph