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   Information Is Beautiful (infobeautiful@vis.social)'s status on Thursday, 10-Oct-2024 00:10:01 JST Information Is Beautiful

   Another reasons to tut at the Mercator Map projection - how a circle with a radius of 5,000km, centred on Paris, looks according the the Mercator projection

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     SuperDicq (superdicq@minidisc.tokyo)'s status on Thursday, 10-Oct-2024 00:10:00 JST SuperDicq

     in reply to

     @infobeautiful@vis.social I don't think there's a single possible map projection where a circle looks like a circle.

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     翠星石 (suiseiseki@freesoftwareextremist.com)'s status on Thursday, 10-Oct-2024 00:16:17 JST 翠星石

     in reply to
     @infobeautiful The earth isn't a perfect sphere - it's an oblate spheroid, so a circle projected onto that not look perfectly circular.
     
     The Mercator projection was designed to intentionally distort the scale to assist with navigation, which it's quite good for - at least the projected shape is somewhat circular instead of being a rectangle.