via Drew Roos The Mercator projection is infamous for its distortion at high latitudes. This distortion gets exponentially worse as you approach the poles. It is in fact impossible to show the poles on a Mercator map — they are infinitely far away. Any Mercator map you've ever seen must cut off the top and bottom edges at some arbitrary point. The map stops short hundreds, if not thousands of miles away from the poles. His solution - redo the Mercator, centered on wherever you want (e.g., where you live), and reduce the cutoff to make it somewhat mind-boggingly tall To make things actually interesting, we must artifically shift the pole of the project to a more interesting place. Imagine the earth encased by a rigid cage of latitude and longitude lines. We rotate the earth while leaving the cage fixed until a new point of interest has taken the place of the North Pole. This is called an oblique Mercator , and is normally used to shift an area of interest onto the e