[Proj] best projection for europe

[Michael P Finn]

Markus,

I might suggest the Albers Equal Area (or Lambert Equal Area Conic) if you
are most interested in preserving area or the Lambert Conformal Conic if
you are most interested is preserving shape. You can check out a tool we
produced to try to help answer these types of questions:
http://helios.er.usgs.gov/research/DSSMain/DSSApplet.html.

Mike Finn



----- Forwarded by Michael P Finn/NMD/USGS/DOI on 12/16/2004 01:05 PM -----
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  |       Subject:  [Proj] best projection for europe                                                                      |
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Hello,

I'm in the need for a good projection for displaying maps of (parts of)
europe. We currently have all our data in WGS84 long/lat format in our
PostGIS database. Is there any projection that you can advise from your
experience to use for the whole europe?

Currently, we simply use long/lat as karthesian coordinates with some
shortening on the y axis, which is acceptable for southern and middle
europe, but gets weird in northern europe.

Usually, one would use the well known UTM or Gauss-Krüger projections
from the EPSG database for europe, but both divide the data into zones.
This has two drawbacks. First, handling zones adds complexity to the
code that I would prefer to avoid in the first releases. Second, when we
"zoom out" to display the whole europe (from spain to slovakia, from
italy to scandinavia), it is difficult to "glue" the zones together.

If anyone has made some good experiences with a specific projection, I'd
be happy to hear about it.

Thanks a lot,
Markus

--
markus schaber | dipl. informatiker
logi-track ag | rennweg 14-16 | ch 8001 zürich
phone +41-43-888 62 52 | fax +41-43-888 62 53
mailto:schabios at logi-track.com | www.logi-track.com
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