World Maps

Click here for Clover Vector Map (89KB)

The Equatorial Aspect of the Azimuthal Equidistant Projection§ in its spherical form has the characteristic that all directions (or "azimuths") are correct when measured from the center of the projection. It is not an equal-area projection, but instead offers distances that are true to scale from the center (and only the center) to all other points on the map. In its more complex oblique ellipsoidal form, the projection is currently used by the French and Greeks for coastal and topographic mapping. In the Equatorial Aspect, the only straight lines are the central meridian and the Equator. The meridians 90 east and west of the central meridian form a perfect circle, which is evenly divided by the intersecting parallels. The remaining meridians and parallels are complex curves.

Projected inside AutoCAD® by Ptolemytm 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.

Four Leaf Clover

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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.