4 ms·

Interactive Comparison of Map Projections

54 points by peey 6y ago

schemescape 6y ago
Why does Greenland disappear for some of the projections?
- sloucher 6y ago
  Also the UK is missing from the Mercator projection.
  - tantalor 6y ago
    And Indonesia, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Cuba, Madagascar. I think the bug is related to islands!
  - tetris11 6y ago
    Weirdly these missing islands persist into the lower projections, unless you first select a higher projection on the list and then proceed with the lower ones (skipping Mercator)
  - globular-toast 6y ago
    It's actually just the Mercator projection that is broken for some reason. Lots of things are missing.
- supernova87a 6y ago
  "Denmark opted out of paying the mapping API license fee to Miller Cylindrical LLC, and so Greenland has been omitted from the data product for your convenience."
ytechie 6y ago
I've heard that all map projections are a compromise. Is this a leftover of printed maps? If you take a photo of the earth, you can't argue that it's inaccurate, as it's literally a photo. When you use something like Google Earth, it's the same deal. You can rotate the map and everything is rendered fairly accurately for any given perspective. Aren't they an accurate representation?
- batmanthehorse 6y ago
  It's a fact of projecting the surface of a sphere onto a 2D plane. You can't see every side of the earth at once in Google Earth. Even the globe you look at in Google Earth is distorted since it's still a 3D projection into 2D. Looking at it from the equator, countries at the equator will appear larger relative to countries near the poles. Anyway! This site is really cool. I think 'Natural Earth' is most satisfying to me subjectively. Looks close enough to what we're all raised with, and seems to have a good balance of various types of distortion.
- joebergeron 6y ago
  Try peeling an orange with as few tears as possible, and flattening the skin against a hard surface.
glup 6y ago
This is super neat, but it is missing my favorite projection: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transverse_Mercator_projection https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transverse_Mercator_projection. To think that Mercator has the same error profile as Transverse Mercator, but we generally accept the former because of ubiquity, is very disturbing to me.
nausher81 6y ago
Interesting visualization. There was also another page on the web which showed the various distortions on the maps themselves. While I can't find that, there is also this slightly deeper dive into projections - https://kartoweb.itc.nl/geometrics/Map%20projections/body.htm https://kartoweb.itc.nl/geometrics/Map%20projections/body.ht... And for a more humorous take, this XKCD gem - https://xkcd.com/977/ https://xkcd.com/977/

54 points by peey 6y ago

schemescape 6y ago

Why does Greenland disappear for some of the projections?

sloucher 6y ago
Also the UK is missing from the Mercator projection.
- tantalor 6y ago
  And Indonesia, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Cuba, Madagascar. I think the bug is related to islands!
- tetris11 6y ago
  Weirdly these missing islands persist into the lower projections, unless you first select a higher projection on the list and then proceed with the lower ones (skipping Mercator)
- globular-toast 6y ago
  It's actually just the Mercator projection that is broken for some reason. Lots of things are missing.
supernova87a 6y ago
"Denmark opted out of paying the mapping API license fee to Miller Cylindrical LLC, and so Greenland has been omitted from the data product for your convenience."

ytechie 6y ago

I've heard that all map projections are a compromise. Is this a leftover of printed maps? If you take a photo of the earth, you can't argue that it's inaccurate, as it's literally a photo. When you use something like Google Earth, it's the same deal. You can rotate the map and everything is rendered fairly accurately for any given perspective. Aren't they an accurate representation?

batmanthehorse 6y ago
It's a fact of projecting the surface of a sphere onto a 2D plane. You can't see every side of the earth at once in Google Earth. Even the globe you look at in Google Earth is distorted since it's still a 3D projection into 2D. Looking at it from the equator, countries at the equator will appear larger relative to countries near the poles. Anyway! This site is really cool. I think 'Natural Earth' is most satisfying to me subjectively. Looks close enough to what we're all raised with, and seems to have a good balance of various types of distortion.
joebergeron 6y ago
Try peeling an orange with as few tears as possible, and flattening the skin against a hard surface.

glup 6y ago

This is super neat, but it is missing my favorite projection: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transverse_Mercator_projection https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transverse_Mercator_projection. To think that Mercator has the same error profile as Transverse Mercator, but we generally accept the former because of ubiquity, is very disturbing to me.

nausher81 6y ago

Interesting visualization. There was also another page on the web which showed the various distortions on the maps themselves. While I can't find that, there is also this slightly deeper dive into projections - https://kartoweb.itc.nl/geometrics/Map%20projections/body.htm https://kartoweb.itc.nl/geometrics/Map%20projections/body.ht... And for a more humorous take, this XKCD gem - https://xkcd.com/977/ https://xkcd.com/977/