My favourite for world maps is still Winkel Tripel (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winkel_tripel_projection). Winkel-Tripel was given one of the best ranks by Gott and Goldberg, before they developed the projection in the OP.
Winkel Tripel used to be the standard until Google Maps came along and pushed everyone back to using Mercator for data visualization and political maps.
My favourite for "local area" usage was the old New Zealand Map Grid .. not a polyconic projection, rather a custom complex polynomial optimised to reduce grid error in toto (by multiple metrics) for the North and South Islands of New Zealand.
As a topographic grid projection it was aligned with the "spine of best fit" of the two islands, rather than stright up North|South aligned, and weighted to minimise the N|S and E|W distortion within the land region of interest as distance from the centre zone increased.
https://www.linz.govt.nz/guidance/geodetic-system/coordinate...
There were very few (three ?) in use about the world pre WGS84 .. and like many things went the way of the Dodo, the Krasovsky 1940 ellipsoid, the Bessel 1841, and all those tens and tens of other ellipsoids, datums, and projections of days yore.
Paper link: https://www.linz.govt.nz/resources/research/conformal-mappin...
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peirce_quincuncial_projection
The ideal projection is simply 3D, as it accounts for all scales, and the geoid if so inclined.
Unless you have 3D display that is not really true, it is still projected to 2D; perspective projection is still projection and it is not obvious that it's in any way "ideal" for maps
If you want accurate, it is also silly to insist on it being a static 2d projection? Having a globe is not exactly difficult.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Perspective_projection
That's cool but by that argument can't i just fold a Mercator map in half and also have no boundary cut?
The problem statement is: find a mapping from the surface of a sphere to ℝ² that minimizes a particular penalty function. This paper maps each hemisphere to ℝ², and then argues that the normal boundary penalty term can be ignored.
However, if you just look at what the map does to South America and Africa, where there's a massive discontinuity at the equator, it's absurd to argue that the boundary penalty should be ignored. This map is useless for equatorial regions, and the penalty function should reflect that.
As far as I can tell its not published anywhere nor received any peer review.
You need to both fold it in half and glue the ends together, basically creating a torus (or two-sided cylinder) shape
Is it not that?
Maybe the answer is "no" but I really can't understand why.
I just like properly split sinusoidal map the most though [0] Sinusoidal map is where you start at the pole and unwrap the circles of latitude.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Usgs_map_sinousidal_equal...
Example: https://imgur.com/rgeg1Lc
[1] https://marcinciura.wordpress.com/2015/11/17/slicing-earth-c...
edit: I didn't even know about this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_and_water_hemispheres
The blog series I was reading: https://blog.plover.com/aliens/dd/intro.html
The Cosmic Call map was specifically pages 19-20: https://blog.plover.com/aliens/dd/p19.html
Okay in the limit it has no area, but if you see it as a limiting process of arbitrarily thin strips then the distortion goes to 0 as the width decreases.
I agree with the other commenter that this would be a good default.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-most-accurate...
>Previously, Goldberg and I identified six critical error types a flat map can have: local shapes, areas, distances, flexion (bending), skewness (lopsidedness) and boundary cuts. >The Goldberg-Gott error score (sum of squares of the six normalized individual error terms)[...]
But a generalised metric misses some points: practical maps of the world emphasise continuity at the points the mapmaker subjectively considers important. The standard Mercator projection has the London meridian at the centre, not purely because Europe was considered important but because the antipodal meridian through the Pacific, not passing through any population centres, is considered unimportant. Other projections like Goode-homolosine [0] are even more opinionated.
This map emphasises the polar areas, which are front and centre, and introduces a boundary cut along the equator, cutting populous countries like Brazil, Kenya and Indonesia in two. (It's ridiculous to say there's no boundary cut because you can turn the map over - in the same way you can fold a Mercator map or roll it into a cylinder, though admittedly other projections like Winkel-tripel don't have this property).
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goode_homolosine_projection
Hemispherical projections have different properties.
https://map-projections.net/compare.php?p1=azimuthal-equidis...
(but envisioned as being glued to opposite sides of a single disk)
It's probably increased accessibility of applied map projection plotting libraries vs. the knowledge of theory and history as formal requirement for making up stuff like this. See also Gall-Peters. Formalizing and marketing Map Projectsions are two separate skill sets.
https://twitter.com/mxfh/status/1363807641932337153
Physplaining [2] describes this quite well, if there is an established body of resarch and astrophysic specialist "rediscover" a specialist area that got reduced exposure with in the era of digital print and publishing.
[1] https://www.mappingasprocess.net/blog/2021/2/17/a-radically-...
[2] https://www.mappingasprocess.[net/blog/2021/2/21/perfecting-...
Here's one that I just found online:
https://fineartamerica.com/featured/vintage-stars-map-celest...
https://observablehq.com/@d3/azimuthal-equidistant-hemispher...
Maybe this mapping is most useful for accurately tracking global warming effects at the poles.
I don't really agree with the claims in the articles linked in OP, and don't find it to be a generally useful projection, even for the tool I made using it. It was novel as a representation that included daylight context (instead of just "what time is it there?" it helped express "is it getting dark there?") that preserved area better than a globe and was more intuitive than a day/night waveform on a rectilinear projection. But ultimately, if you're showing anything that has to do with populations (cities, people) pretty much any projection will waste large amounts of space on oceans and unpopulated land regions. That is to say, before choosing a favorite map projection, I think it's probably better to not to use a map projection at all unless you're going for a hike or setting sail.
Somebody beat me to the obligatory xkcd, but this West Wing bit is my go-to for map projection discussions: https://youtu.be/vVX-PrBRtTY
I like framing map projections by what they prioritize or sacrifice—fidelity in axis, position, size—and what projection is "best" depends entirely on which characteristics are more important. I disagree with OP's claim about this projection being "the most accurate flat map of the Earth yet" though haven't put a ton of thought into the physical, back-to-back definition of "flat" vs on-screen.
