Maps & Cartography

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.

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).

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

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

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.