What is Transverse Mercator used for?

What is Transverse Mercator used for?

The transverse Mercator projection is appropriate for mapping large-scale or smaller areas with predominantly north-south trending extents. It is a very commonly used projection. Various countries use it for their topographic maps and large-scale coordinate systems.

What problems did Gerardus Mercator?

In 1569, Mercator published his epic world map. This map, with its Mercator projection, was designed to help sailors navigate around the globe. They could use latitude and longitude lines to plot a straight route. Mercator’s projection laid out the globe as a flattened version of a cylinder.

Why is the Mercator map misleading?

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.

Does Google Earth use Mercator?

Google Earth (also Google Maps and Microsoft Virtual Earth) use a Mercator projection based on a spherical datum (in ESRI parlance, datum = “Geographic Coordinate System; GCS”) that is a modification of the WGS84 datum.

What is UTM in survey?

The Universal Transverse Mercator (UTM) is a map projection system for assigning coordinates to locations on the surface of the Earth. Like the traditional method of latitude and longitude, it is a horizontal position representation, which means it ignores altitude and treats the earth as a perfect ellipsoid.

How do UTM coordinates work?

The UTM (Universal Transverse Mercator) coordinate system divides the world into sixty north-south zones, each 6 degrees of longitude wide. Within each zone, coordinates are measured as northings and eastings in meters. The northing values are measured from zero at the equator in a northerly direction.

What did Gerardus Mercator accomplish?

He is most renowned for creating the 1569 world map based on a new projection which represented sailing courses of constant bearing (rhumb lines) as straight lines—an innovation that is still employed in nautical charts. Mercator was a highly influential pioneer in the history of cartography.

Is the map really upside down?

“As far as we astronomers can tell, there really is no ‘up’ or ‘down’ in space,” he says. So the answer to the question of which way up is the Earth is simple: it is not any particular way up and there is no good reason other than a historical superiority complex to think of north as being the top of the world.

Why do they shrink Africa?

It’s because most maps use the Mercator Projection. On it, Greenland looks to be the same size as Africa. In reality, Africa is actually 14 times larger. Replicating the globe onto a flat surface distorts the sizes of the countries yet many have no idea.

Is Google Maps distorted?

Google Maps use a Spherical Normal (equatorial) variant of the Mercator projection for its map images. While the Mercator projection distorts a ‘zoomed-out view’ of the world, it allows close-ups (street level) to appear more like reality because it preserves street angles.

What is the purpose of the Mercator projection?

Rather, the Mercator projection was designed to permit rhumb lines drawn on the projection to be straight lines. This characteristic was particularly useful to navigators in that they could lay out a rhumb line on the map and then follow its compass direction from the origin to destination.

What did Mercator do for the world?

In addition to publishing his famous projection, Mercator was the pioneer of another geographical tool we use to this day. He coined the term “atlas” (named after the Greek mythological figure who held the world on his shoulders) to describe a collection of maps.

Can I use the old Mercator with mapman?

If you use these annotation files with MapMan you need to use Pathways that start with X4. If you want to use old pathways whose name doesn’t start with X4 you can still use the old Mercator, in any case you can contact b.usadel [at]fz-juelich.de

Who was Gerardus Mercator?

If you have ever seen a map of the world in a classroom or in an atlas, chances are you have seen the work of Gerardus Mercator, a 16 th -century Flemish cartographer (mapmaker).