World Maps

Click Here for Vector Map (58 KB)

The Collignon Projection, named for its inventor, fits the world into a triangle with equally spaced parallels, and meridians which meet at the pole and are equally spaced at the equator. The resulting map has little cartographic value, having none of the qualities mapmakers ordinarily seek: it is neither equal-area nor conformal; neither angles nor distances are true; and scale varies widely across the map. Its sole advantage is artistic: in the form presented here, the Collignon is interrupted into eight sections arranged in a butterfly. Cut out and suitably folded and glued, the map can be formed into the eight-sided three-dimensional figure known as an octahedron, with the hemispheres forming two pyramids connected at their bases.

Projected by custom software by W. Murray Sexton from VersaMap 2.01, a version of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Micro World Database by Charles Culberson http://www.members.aol.com/versamap, last updated July 1998 to show recent changes to national boundaries and many more islands.

Butterfly Collignon

Scroll down for description.

Click East for next map.

Click North to return to list.

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.