
Interactive Comparison of Map Projections - peey
https://bl.ocks.org/syntagmatic/ba569633d51ebec6ec6e
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glup
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.

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schemescape
Why does Greenland disappear for some of the projections?

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sloucher
Also the UK is missing from the Mercator projection.

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tantalor
And Indonesia, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Cuba, Madagascar.

I think the bug is related to islands!

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ytechie
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?

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batmanthehorse
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.

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nausher81
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.ht...](https://kartoweb.itc.nl/geometrics/Map%20projections/body.htm)
And for a more humorous take, this XKCD gem -
[https://xkcd.com/977/](https://xkcd.com/977/)

