What is Mercator?
What is Mercator?
Mercator is a conformal cylindrical map projection that was originally created to display accurate compass bearings for sea travel. An additional feature of this projection is that all local shapes are accurate and correctly defined at infinitesimal scale. It was presented by Gerardus Mercator in 1569.
What is Mercator famous for?
His most famous work, the Mercator projection, is a geographical chart where the spherical globe is flattened into a two-dimensional map, with latitude and longitude lines drawn in a straight grid. Mercator’s view of the world is one that has endured through the centuries and still helps navigators today.
What’s wrong with Mercator?
Mercator maps distort the shape and relative size of continents, particularly near the poles. The popular Mercator projection distorts the relative size of landmasses, exaggerating the size of land near the poles as compared to areas near the equator.
Why is Web Mercator used?
The projection is appropriate for large-scale mapping of the areas near the equator such as Indonesia and parts of the Pacific Ocean. Due to its property of straight rhumb lines, it is recommended for standard sea navigation charts. Its variant, the Web Mercator projection, is standard for web maps and online services.
What is map distortion?
distortion. On a map or image, the misrepresentation of shape, area, distance, or direction of or between geographic features when compared to their true measurements on the curved surface of the earth.
How do you pronounce Mercator?
Break ‘Mercator’ down into sounds: [MUH] + [KAY] + [TUH] – say it out loud and exaggerate the sounds until you can consistently produce them.
Who is the father of modern mapping?
Gerardus Mercator
Mercator was one of the pioneers of cartography and is widely considered the most notable figure of Netherlandish school of cartography in its golden age (approximately 1570s–1670s)….
| Gerardus Mercator | |
|---|---|
| Born | Geert de Kremer 5 March 1512 Rupelmonde, County of Flanders (modern-day Belgium) |
Who is father of Dutch cartography?
Gerard Mercator
The father of Dutch cartography is often considered to be the Flanders born, Gerard Mercator (1512 – 1594). Mercator was regarded in his own lifetime as the “Ptolemy of his time”.
Why was the Mercator map created?
Mercator found that to keep the rhumb lines straight he had to make lines of latitude move away from each other as they moved north and south of the equator. In order to do this, he created a projection that preserved the 90° angles between the latitude and longitude lines. Mercator’s map of the world, 1569.
Is Web Mercator projected or geographic?
Web Mercator is a slight variant of the Mercator projection, one used primarily in Web-based mapping programs. It uses the same formulas as the standard Mercator as used for small-scale maps.
