this post was submitted on 20 May 2024
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[–] [email protected] 51 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Contenents are generally bigger than countries yes.

Here's an actual continent size comparison Contenent sizes

[–] Pirasp 59 points 7 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 25 points 7 months ago (2 children)

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 ;-)

[–] Pirasp 11 points 7 months ago

I'll give you the point on Antarctica, but using multiple different projections is somehow even worse imho

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Any equal area projection recentered for each continent would work.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

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.

[–] force 24 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

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