Osma A 🇫🇮🇺🇦As good a day as any to remind myself that the way most of us has been taught the size of countries is misleading as hell.
j_bertolotti@osma Mercator projection has its uses (largely if you are the navigator of a 17-century ship in the middle of the ocean), but the moment you center it on a different point you see how much it distorts everything.
Javier Jimenez Shaw@j_bertolotti @osma is the initial image centered at the equator? If it is, it doesn't look like a Mercator projection. Africa is too much "compressed"
@jjimenezshaw
There is an extra degree of freedom in plotting the Mercator projection, which is how much of the North and the South are you cropping away (given how the projection is done, the south pole is infinitely down). I just included a bit more stuff at the top and the bottom than usual, so everything in the middle appears a little bit more compressed. But it is a Mercator projection.
@osma
There is an extra degree of freedom in plotting the Mercator projection, which is how much of the North and the South are you cropping away (given how the projection is done, the south pole is infinitely down). I just included a bit more stuff at the top and the bottom than usual, so everything in the middle appears a little bit more compressed. But it is a Mercator projection.
@osma
@j_bertolotti @osma If you "compress" any projection, its properties change. In the case of Mercator, it become not conformal, for instance... so it is not a Mercator projection anymore. Distorting any projection when you want to show how it distorts itself is not fair.
You can add more map in the north and south, as in https://mapstodon.space/@jjimenezshaw/112168427319567417
but not distorting the map. Just adding that area.
It would be nice also to point how the "globe" projection in the left is also distorting.
Javier Jimenez Shaw (@[email protected])
Attached: 1 image Mercator projection is not a conspiracy of northern countries. It is a conspiracy of the southern penguins! Look at the size of Antarctica. It is HUGE! (actually it is infinite) Somehow they convinced the mapmakers to remove most of it from those maps, saying that a square map is ... nicer? #gischat #mercatorprojection
@jjimenezshaw Feel free to make your own animation. I am not stopping you.
Anyway, I used the foirmulas here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercator_projection#Derivation to generate the projection.
