World Maps

Click here for Vector Map (89KB)

The Polar Aspect of the Azimuthal Equidistant Projection§ is thought to have been used for celestial charts by the ancient Eqyptians, though the oldest surviving map of this kind was crafted in 1426 by Conrad of Dyffenbach. It has gone by the names of several subsequent reinventors: Glareanus (1510), Guillaume Postel (1581), and Antonio Cagnoli (1799).

Only distances and directions measured from the center are true, but the simplicity of its equally spaced concentric parallels and radiating meridians makes it among the most readily grasped, and hence most timeless, of maps.

Projected inside AutoCAD® by Ptolemy^tm map projection software by W. Murray Sexton, from the Micro World Database, available from the Central Intelligence Agency.

§ John P. Snyder, Map Projections--A Working Manual, U.S. Geological Survey Professional Paper 1395, United States Government Printing Office, Washington D.C., 1987, pp. 191-202.

Azimuthal Equidistant, Polar Aspect

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If you don’t have Whip! you can still see the JPGs, but to fully appreciate these engineering-quality maps, download and install the free Whip! viewer plug-in (3.5MB). You will then be able to see the scalable vector versions of select maps.

Click on the Vector Map link on each page to view the DWF file. You can pan around and zoom in on them, because they are true scaleable vector drawings. Using the Right Click menu, you can even turn layers on and off individually.

The extreme precision and detail of these maps cannot be reproduced in raster formats. The world maps are designed to be plotted at sizes up to 24” by 36” by robotic pen plotter. Some of the oil and gas maps were designed to be viewed up close when plotted at 300 dpi, at sizes up to 3 feet by 10 feet. The size of a BMP file of that scale would be approximately 1.5 gigabytes.

If you don’t have Whip! you can still see the JPGs, but to fully appreciate these engineering-quality maps, download and install the free Whip! viewer plug-in (3.5MB). You will then be able to see the scalable vector versions of select maps.

Click on the Vector Map link on each page to view the DWF file. You can pan around and zoom in on them, because they are true scaleable vector drawings. Using the Right Click menu, you can even turn layers on and off individually.

If you have limited bandwidth, be aware that the DWF files contained in this site range from about 100KB to about 750KB.