Maps & Cartography Archives - Page 2 of 4

North America Lambert Conformal Conic Projection

Conic Projection: Lambert, Albers and Polyconic

When you place a cone on the Earth and unwrap it, this results in a conic projection. Examples are Albers Equal Area Conic and the Lambert Conformal Conic.

State Plane Coordinate System Map Projections

The State Plane Coordinate System (SPCS)

The State Plane Coordinate System divides the United States into 124 zones to locate any point with a high level of accuracy (one part in 10,000).

Tissot's indicatrix North American Lamert Conformal Conic

Map Distortion with Tissot’s Indicatrix

Map distortion is best understood looking at Tissot’s indicatrix. It contains circles and shows how map projections distort shape, size and distances.

How to Create Flow Maps and Link Movement with Direction Lines

Cartographers use lines to show the movement of phenomenon (people, ideas or money) in flow maps. To show the magnitude, they change the width of flow lines

Cartogram Maps: Data Visualization with Exaggeration

Cartogram maps distorts reality to convey information. It accomplishes this by resizing and exaggerating any variable using a polygons geometry.

How to Sketch a Voronoi Diagram with Thiessen Polygons

In a Voronoi Diagram, when you take a point in any given Thiessen polygon, it indicates that it’s closer to that generating point than to any other.

Choropleth Maps – A Guide to Data Classification

Equal intervals, quantile, natural breaks, pretty breaks- data classification methods generate different choropleth maps. We explain the types of maps here.

Azimuthal Projection: Orthographic, Stereographic and Gnomonic

The azimuthal projection plots the surface of Earth using a flat plane. For example, common azimuthal projections are gnomonic, stereographic & orthographic

Aspect Maps: How Do You Find Out the Aspect of a Slope?

In the mountains, the terrain slopes are in all directions – east, west, north and south-facing. The compass direction that the slope faces is slope aspect.

Universal Transverse Mercator - UTM Zones (False Northing, False Easting)

How Universal Transverse Mercator (UTM) Works

Universal Transverse Mercator (UTM) segments the Earth into 60 zones (each UTM zone is 6‎°) and projects each zone with an upright cylinder of its own.