this post was submitted on 20 May 2024
305 points (93.7% liked)
Map Enthusiasts
3286 readers
39 users here now
For the map enthused!
Rules:
-
post relevant content: interesting, informative, and/or pretty maps
-
be nice
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Contenents are generally bigger than countries yes.
Here's an actual continent size comparison
Except, that your picture shows the continents in the usual Mercator projection distorted way. This type of projection makes countries nearer to the poles look way larger than they actually are.
Antarctica is definitely not Mercator there!
And finding a good projection for the entirety of Asia would be difficult.
Now, using Mercator Russia in the OP image with Africa.... But I've already complained about that in two other crossposts ;-)
I'll give you the point on Antarctica, but using multiple different projections is somehow even worse imho
Any equal area projection recentered for each continent would work.
Recentered is the thing.
I've often wished map apps would recenter the Mercator projection for wherever you are in the world. So you could zoom out on e.g. Russia and see the world map as if the 'equator' were through Russia and the 'poles' at ... somewhere in the North Atlantic and South Indian Ocean?
Bonus points if you can rotate too
I volunteer to implement the backend for this, if someone else will do the frontend. It should be easy enough to do a spherical rotation before whatever data gets passed to the projection math.
If you want an azimuthal equidistant projection centered somewhere, this website already exists, but that doesn't help us here.
here's a replica i just made using the equal earth projection
and here's one using the authagraph projection
i wanted to make one using the mollweide projection, but i couldn't find a good blank map with borders to use
they're both poor work, but i don't want to put in the effort to fix them, and it's pretty funny imagining icelanders getting mad that i put them in north america
both used blank world map images ripped from wikipedia plus getpaint.net
I don't know what projection that map uses. The vertically squished Greenland makes it seem like it's closer to a equal area projection. But I couldn't find a similar comparison image that I could make sure was using an equal area projection. If you have one, I'd love to see it.
The order is correct at least https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continent