19 Facts About Mercator projection

Mercator projection is a cylindrical map projection presented by Flemish geographer and cartographer Gerardus Mercator in 1569.

The projection found on these maps, dating to 1511, was stated by Snyder in 1987 to be the same projection as Mercator's.

Mercator projection titled the map : "A new and augmented description of Earth corrected for the use of sailors".

Mercator projection never explained the method of construction or how he arrived at it.

Development of the Mercator projection represented a major breakthrough in the nautical cartography of the 16th century.

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Once the Mercator became the usual projection for commercial and educational maps, it came under persistent criticism from cartographers for its unbalanced representation of landmasses and its inability to usefully show the polar regions.

Criticisms leveled against inappropriate use of the Mercator projection resulted in a flurry of new inventions in the late 19th and early 20th century, often directly touted as alternatives to the Mercator.

Today, the Mercator can be found in marine charts, occasional world maps, and Web mapping services, but commercial atlases have largely abandoned it, and wall maps of the world can be found in many alternative projections.

At latitudes greater than 70° north or south the Mercator projection is practically unusable, because the linear scale becomes infinitely large at the poles.

Mercator projection is often compared to and confused with the central cylindrical projection, which is the result of projecting points from the sphere onto a tangent cylinder along straight radial lines, as if from a light source placed at the Earth's center.

However, despite such distortions, the Mercator projection was, especially in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, perhaps the most common projection used in world maps, despite being much criticized for this use.

The Mercator projection is still commonly used for areas near the equator where distortion is minimal.

The Mercator projection he promoted is a specific parameterization of the cylindrical equal-area Mercator projection.

Mercator projection was designed for use in marine navigation because of its unique property of representing any course of constant bearing as a straight segment.

For example, a Mercator projection map printed in a book might have an equatorial width of 13.

Mercator projection is determined by the requirement that the projection be conformal.

Nicolas Tissot noted that the scale factors at a point on a map Mercator projection, specified by the numbers h and k, define an ellipse at that point.

Ordinate y of the Mercator projection becomes infinite at the poles and the map must be truncated at some latitude less than ninety degrees.

Straight line on the Mercator projection map at angle a to the meridians is a rhumb line.