Information Is BeautifulAnother reasons to tut at the Mercator Map projection - how a circle with a radius of 5,000km, centred on Paris, looks according the Mercator map
Coffee
Bill, organizer of stuff@coffee @infobeautiful But what if we took the Goode Homolosine and made it completely useless!
🐦⬛@wcbdata @coffee @infobeautiful That's not completely useless. Not ideal for navigation, but it is a decent map of the Earth's oceans.
Kim Spence-Jones 🇬🇧😷@Crow @wcbdata @coffee @infobeautiful Mercator is ideal for short-to-medium distance navigation, because it gives correct bearings between ant two points. However, that results in a course which is longer than the great circle route (except for due N-S bearings), so not a good plan for trans-oceanic journey planning.
Dirk Janssen@KimSJ @Crow @wcbdata @coffee @infobeautiful A navigator would never plan a transocean voyage on a mercator map. The professionals have special maps and/or can calculate the great circle courses without a map.
@dirkaufsee @KimSJ @wcbdata @coffee @infobeautiful I didn't make the claim that they would, merely that this map is not "completely" useless. If it's all you had, you could still potentially get where you're trying to sail.
@Crow @KimSJ @wcbdata @coffee @infobeautiful If you only have a Mercator as a navigator, you would calculate the great circle and the distance you have to travel on the Mercator map until you have to change the course by one degree.