This page is a sub-page of our page on Stereographic Projection.
Related sources of information:
• Map at Wikipedia
• Map projections – a video lecture GIScienceRIT at YouTube, 2 Sept 2014
• The three main families of map projections at mathworld.com
• Geocart Projections at www.mapthematics.com
• Images for Map Projection Types at Google
• Different views of the world at www.viewsoftheworld.net
• Visualizing the world in different projections David Madore on YouTube, 25 Nov 2013
• Worldmapper at https://worldmapper.org
• The Mercator projection at Wikipedia
• The man behind the Mercator projection – Stuff of Genius on YouTube
• The Transverse Mercator Projection at Wikipedia
• Universal Transverse Mercator (UTM) coordinate system at Wikipedia
• Loxodrome (= Rhumb line) at Wikipedia
• Stereographic projection at Wikipedia
• Loxodromic navigation at Wikipedia
• Tissot’s indicatrix at Wikipedia
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The interactive simulations on this page can be navigated with the Free Viewer
of the Graphing Calculator.
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Map projection of Earth .avi (ALAzharSEG on YouTube):
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Why all world maps are wrong (Vox on YouTube):
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The Mercator projection
/////// Quoting Wikipedia / Mercator projection:
The Mercator projection is a cylindrical map projection presented by the Flemish geographer and cartographer Gerardus Mercator in 1569. It became the standard map projection for nautical navigation because of its ability to represent lines of constant course, known as rhumb lines or loxodromes, as straight segments that conserve the angles with the meridians.
Although the linear scale is equal in all directions around any point, thus preserving the angles and the shapes of small objects (making it a conformal map projection), the Mercator projection distorts the size of objects as the latitude increases from the Equator to the poles, where the scale becomes infinite.
So, for example, landmasses such as Greenland and Antarctica appear much larger than they actually are, relative to landmasses near the equator such as Central Africa.
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Gerardus Mercator: Three ways the influential cartographer changed the way we look at the world:
Robin Show on YouTube, 5 March 2015
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The Mercator projection:
The interactive simulation that created this movie.
Mercator projection (first step): Projecting a loxodrome into a logarithmic spiral:
The interactive simulation that created this movie.
Mercator projection (second step): Mapping the logarithmic spiral into a straight line
(by exponentiating it):
The interactive simulation that created this movie.
An alternative interactive simulation that shows the same thing.
Combining step 1 and step 2 to get the Mercator projection:
Reading from left to right takes you from the navigator’s map to the actual curve on the globe (the loxodrome) that it corresponds to.
Note: Unfortunately, I cannot connect the left and middle panes to the video in the pane to the right. For that I would have needed three independent panes. In that case you would have seen the points moving “in synch” in all three panes.
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History of navigation :
• Majorcan cartographic school
• • Angelino Dulcert (fl. 1339)
• • Abraham Cresques (1325–1387)
• • Jehuda Cresques (1360 – 1410)
• • Catalan atlas and Abraham and Jehuda Cresques
• • Other Jewish cartographers
• • Catalan atlas
• The Age of Discovery
• Age of exploration
• • Prince Henry, the Navigator (1394 – 1460)
• Portuguese maritime exploration
• Rhumbline network
• Portolan chart
• Bartolomeus Dias (c. 1450 – 1500)
• • Voyage around Africa
• Vasco da Gama (c. 1460s – 1524)
• • First voyage
• • Second voyage
• • Third voyage and death
• Pedro Nunes (1502 – 1578)
• Treaty of Tordesillas 1494
• League (unit)
• Traditional French units of measurement
• Treaty of Tordesillas – Antimeridian: Moluccas and Treaty of Zaragoza
• Treaty of Tordesillas (1524) – Wikipedia
• Treaty of Zaragoza 1529
• Christopher Columbus (1451 – 1506)
• • Geographical considerations
• • Nautical considerations
• The discovery of the Celendrical dateline
• The International Date Line
•• The International Date Line – Historic alterations
• Antonio Pigafetta (c. 1491 – c. 1531)
• Ferdinand Magellan (1480 – 1521)
• • Juan Sebastián Elcano (1486/1487 – 1526)
• Loxodromic navigation
• Gerardus Mercator (1512 – 1594)
• John Dee (1527 – 1608)
• Francis Drake (c. 1540 – 1596)
• Willem Schouten (c. 1567 – 1625)
• Jacob Le Maire (c. 1585 – 1616)
• • Cape Horn
• History of longitude
• • John Harrison (1693 – 1776)
• • • Lunar distances versus chronometers
• • • Nevil Maskelyne (1732 – 1811)
• James Cook (1728 – 1779)
• • First voyage
• • Second voyage
• History of cartography
• Geomatics
• Eratosthenes
• Werner projection of the world
• Stereographic map projection
• Tissot’s indicatrix
• Shen Kuo
• Gerardus Mercator
• Arnold Mercator
• Rumold Mercator
• Johannes Stabius
• Uranometria
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Background:
• Spice trade
• Overview of the 16th century
• Treaty of Tordesillas (1494): This article is about the 1494 treaty between Portugal and Spain that divided the world as then understood between the two.
For the treaty signed in 1524 between Spain and Monaco, see Treaty of Tordesillas (1524).
• Background: the Moluccas issue
Conflict (1520 – 1529): The conflict began in 1520, when expeditions of both kingdoms reached the Pacific Ocean, because no agreed meridian of longitude had been established in the Orient.
• Treaty of Zaragoza (1529): The Treaty of Zaragoza, also called the Capitulation of Zaragoza (alternatively spelled Saragossa) was a peace treaty between Castile and Portugal, signed on 22 April 1529 by King John III of Portugal and the Castilian emperor Charles V, in the Aragonese city of Zaragoza. The treaty defined the areas of Castilian and Portuguese influence in Asia, in order to resolve the “Moluccas issue”, which had arisen because both kingdoms claimed the Maluku Islands for themselves, asserting that they were within their area of influence as specified in 1494 by the Treaty of Tordesillas.