World Maps

Click Here for Vector Map (91 KB)

Distinguished by its elliptical shape and elegantly poleward curving parallels, the Hammer-Aitoff Projection§¦ was introduced by Ernst Hammer in 1892. This equal-area ellipse is derived from the circular Azimuthal Equal Area Projection by halving the vertical coordinates and doubling the distance of the meridians from the center. The curvature of the parallels lessens the distortion of shape apparent at the extremes of the similar Mollweide Projection, which is also elliptical but has straight parallels. It is well-suited and widely used for world-wide statistical thematic maps.

Projected inside AutoCAD® by Ptolemytm map projection software by W. Murray Sexton, from the Micro World Database, available from the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency.

§ Frederick Pearson, II, Map Projections: Theory and Applications, CRC Press, Boca Raton, FL, 1990, pp. 149-152.

¦John P. Snyder, Map Projections--A Working Manual, U.S. Geological Survey Professional Paper 1395, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington D.C., 1987, p. 182.

Hammer-Aitoff

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.