Lab 5

 In this lab I created six individual maps that each displays a different type of map projection.  The first map projection is equal area and for this I chose Eckert IV and Bonne projections.  The next type of map projection is equidistant, for which I chose Berghaus Star and Azimuthal Equidistant projections.  The final type of map projection is conformal.  For my conformal map projection choices I chose Mercator and Stereographic.  Creating these different map projections in ArcMAP was not too difficult.  It involved creating new data frames and then choosing the map projection style to use.  I then measured the distance between two cities that I labeled on the map, Washington D.C. and Kabul, Afghanistan.  I found the measure tool a bit complicated because I was unsure of how to use the different measurement types.  I chose to just measure my maps using the planar measurement type.  Overall, even though this lab took me some time to complete it was not too tedious; it just required closely following a few steps. 

I found it very interesting how greatly the distance between Washington D.C. and Kabul, Afghanistan changed based on the type of map projection used.  The two map projections that had the greatest difference in distant were the Mercator and Bonne projections, with the Mercator projection having the distance between the two cities as 10,112.12 miles and the Bonne projection measuring the distance as 6.730.70 miles.  The different map projections of the same style seemed to have slightly different distances, but not as great as the differences between different types of map projections.

Map projection takes the physical three-dimensional world and translates it to a two-dimensional representation.  Map projection is very important because it allows for the world to be translated to a usable form.  People can study maps to learn about the Earth, and map projections allow a practical way of doing so.  Map projections even allow maps to be scaled to sizes that are portable and can fit in a car, carried with someone on a hike or displayed on a computer.  Certain map projections represent the Earth better than others.  The type of map projections can be chose by the creator based upon what they are trying to represent.  Some appear more consistent with how the Earth truly is, while some make it appear very different.  Of the map projections I chose the ones that are commonly used are Azimuthal Equidistant, Mercator and Stereographic.  Some of the other map projections that I used are uncommon and even appear very different. For example, the Berghaus Star was unlike any type of projection I have seen before. 

Map projections do have some downfalls.  The Earth is a round, and this must be translated to a flat piece of paper so it is obvious that there are going to be distortions.  For example, the Mercator projection makes Greenland appear as though it is huge and make Africa appear very small.  This projection distorts the size of countries and can be misleading.  In actuality Africa is not that small, and Greenland is not that large.  Another example of distortions can be seen on the Bonne projection.  On the Bonne projection it appears as though Africa is huge and makes Greenland look very small.  Maps can be very deceiving based on the way in which they are projected.  Another downfall of map projections is that different style projections will not be consistent.  This is shown through the different representations of map projections that I created in this lab because the distance between the two cities varied greatly.