lab.3 - the.mollweide.graticule

Wow. I really do despise being in the lab on a Sunday just to do this, but I frankly don't have the time during the week. GMU's campus is pretty dead on Sundays, and oddly enough there are a bunch of little kids at the Aquatic and Fitness center. Since I'm the only one in the lab at this point, the lights keep going off because I'm not moving much, and I suppose they're hooked up to a motion sensor. So here I sit, in the dark, in the armpit of the campus that is the old Robinson building, alone and posting a blog. Goodness I love college!

But seriously, this lab was not without its difficulties. For one thing, the instructions for how to make the lines of longitude were probably more complex than they needed to be. I found that if you select the ellipse tool, hold the alt key, and then click once directly at the point you want the equator and prime meridian to meet, that you can specify the exact width and height of the ellipse you want to make. So all I had to do was use the conversion given to us (72 points = 1 inch), note that the width was 10 inches, giving me a total of 720 points, etc. etc. (not trying to give away the answers to someone who hasn't done it yet....) and I could figure out exactly how wide I needed the next ellipse to be. No clicking and dragging...just entering numbers, and *poof*! You have your ellipses.

I couldn't get the 'distance' concept to work in order to draw my lines of latitude, so I got creative. Rather than use inches, I used pixels, and went to good ol' Google to figure out the conversion from inches to pixels so that I could convert the values given to us in the instructions into pixels. Looking back, I didn't really need to do this, but at the time I thought I did. So I centered the rulers, then realized that if you use the line segment tool and click once, you can specify the exact length you want the line segment to be, and what angle you want it to go. So, starting at 0 degrees, I specified a vertical height in pixels (converted from the inches given in the instructions), which showed me the height above or below the equator that my line of latitude needed to be. Then I clicked once and drew a line perpendicular to that one, and resized it to fit the graticule.

I also realized that increasing the width of the lines made it more obvious to the eye exactly how distorted the projection gets - the thicker the line, the more intense the color at the poles, which is the most distorted area. So I chose to make my lines 2pt.

I tried and tried but could not get my title above the graticule, so it lies below. I kind of like being different, although I suppose in this case it will work against me. I tried. Seriously.

I dislike maps more than I ever have before and I don't see this changing any time soon. At this point, sitting in this room on a Sunday, I'm reminded why I should have changed majors while the time was right.