Charting the New Hampshire Lakes since 1967®
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Why don't your charts use a Mercator projection?

We do. In spite of what anyone tells you, we do have a transverse Mercator projection on all our recent digitized charts. Have for years.

The reason for this projection is in a quote from the Grandaddy of all cartographers, Borden D. Dent, in his basic book, "Cartography: Thematic Map Design":

". . . if the area of the earth being mapped is small enough, virtually no distortion exists. . .The USCGS thus decided to use three conformal projections to map the states—the Lambert conformal conic for states with long east-west dimensions, the transverse Mercator for states with long north-south dimensions, and the oblique Mercator for portions of Alaska."