Common projections includes: Mercator projection, Gauss-Kruger projection, UTM projection, Lambert projection and so on.
Mercator projection
The Mercator projection is a cylindrical map projection presented by the Flemish geographer and cartographer Gerardus Mercator in 1569.
It became the standard map projection for nautical purposes because of its ability to represent lines of constant course, known as rhumb lines or loxodromes, as straight segments that conserve the angles with the meridians. Although the linear scale is equal in all directions around any point, thus preserving the angles and the shapes of small objects (which makes the projection conformal).
The Mercator projection distorts the size of objects as the latitude increases from the Equator to the poles, where the scale becomes infinite.
Gauss-Kruger projection
The Gauss-Kruger projection is conformal with a constant scale on the central meridian. The ellipsoidal form of the transverse Mercator projection was developed by Carl Friedrich Gauss in 1825 and further analysed by Johann Heinrich Louis Kruger in 1912.
The features of the projection are: Near the central meridian the projection has low distortion and the shapes of Africa, western Europe, the British Isles, Greenland, and Antarctica compare favourably with a globe. The meridians at 90 degree east and west of the chosen central meridian project to horizontal lines through the poles. The more distant hemisphere is projected above the north pole and below the south pole. The equator bisects Africa, crosses South America and then continues onto the complete outer boundary of the projection; the top and bottom edges and the right and left edges must be identified (i.e. they represent the same lines on the globe). (Indonesia is bisected.) Distortion increases towards the right and left boundaries of the projection but it does not increase to infinity. Note the Galapagos Islands where the 90 degree west meridian meets the equator at bottom left.
The Gauss-Kruger projection is now the most widely used projection in accurate large scale mapping.
UTM Projection
The Universal Transverse Mercator (UTM) conformal projection instead divides the Earth into sixty zones, each being a six-degree band of longitude, and uses a secant transverse Mercator projection in each zone.
Lambert Projection
A Lambert conformal conic projection (LCC) is a conic map projection used for aeronautical charts, portions of the State Plane Coordinate System, and many national and regional mapping systems. It is one of seven projections introduced by Johann Heinrich Lambert in his 1772 publication Anmerkungen und Zusatze zur Entwerfung der Land- und Himmelscharten. The distribution of the transformation of the Lambert Projection is:
* The angle doesn't change, which means that the shape of infinitely small area is similar.
* The distortions in the same parallel are the same.
* There are not any distortions at the two standard parallels.
* At the same meridian, distortion length ratio is less than 1 between the two standard parallels, distortion length ratio is greater than 1 at the two standard parallels outside.
* The length of latitude and longitude lines between two parallels is the same.Some content in this article is from Wikipedia.