Lab 5

Lab 5

 

 

The Mercator

 Distance Kabul to Washington DC: 10,124.08913 miles

 

 

 

The Stereogrpahic

  Distance Kabul to Washington DC: 9,878.038997 miles

 

 

 

 

The Behrmann





Distance Kabul to Washington DC: 8,794.637529 miles

 

 

 

 

 The Mollweide

 

Distance Kabul to Washington DC: 7,925.557346 miles

 

 

 

 

The Azimuthal Equidistant

 

Distance Kabul to Washington DC: 8,341.411788 miles

 

 

 

 

 The Equidistant Conic

Distance Kabul to Washington DC: 6,972.480093

 

 

 

 

I chose the Mercator and the Stereographic projects as my conformal projections, the Behrmann and the Mollweide  projections as my equal area projections and the Equidistant Conic and the Azimuthal Equidistant projections as my equidistant projections. In comparing all of these maps by using a distance between two fixed cities, in this case Kabul and Washington D.C., the enormous differences in projected distance can be seen.

 

Each of these projections have thier own benefit for specific reasons. The Mercator has become the standard map for nautical purposes, due to its ability to well illustrate lines of constant course, however this map projection distorts some features in doing this. The Stereogrpahic is a projection of the globe onto a plane. It has a wide range of uses including photograhy cartogrpahy, and geology.

 

The Behrmann creates distortion the further the shape is away from the standard parrellels. The Mollweide is generally used for globe maps of the whole world. It is better for looking at the whole world rather than specific zoomed in locations. The Equidistant Conic is known because all points on the map are correctly distanced from the center point. The Azimuthal Equidistant also has the quality of the Equidistant Conic in that all points on the map are proportionally distanced from the center of the map. This map is useful as a polar projection showing all of the lines of latitude and longditude correctly distanced from the poles. However the distoration does increase the further the shape is away from the center.

 

As we can see each map projection has its purpose and each map has its pitfalls. The problem with all of these projections is that it is hard to find the actual disantce or see the actual areas of the world. For example the Mercator projection shows Greenland to be the same size as Africa when in reality Africa is 16 times larger than Greenland. The imporant thing to remember when using map projections is to use each projection for thier speicific purpose. The good thing is that there are many projections avaible so for all of the possible uses, there will be a projection to cover your specific use. Projections are key to many tasks such as naviagation on a boat or flight paths for planes. However you could not use the same projection for both of those tasks.