Projections - Week 5

This week's assignment was very interesting.  This week we had to make a map with three data frames containing the same image, but displayed in different coordinate systems.

The State of Florida in three projections.  The table shows the square miles of four counties within each data frame.  Check out the difference from one projection to another.

The map also had to contain a table showing the square mileage of four counties in each of the three projections.

For the first data frame we started in an Albers Conical Equal Area projection.  From there we used the Data Management Tools and the Projections and Transformations toolset to access the Project tool.  With this we projected spatial data from one coordinate system to another.  We then created two more data frames and used the same method to assigned coordinate systems to them.  In the end we had data frames for Albers Conical Equal Area, UTM, and State Plane N.

All three of these data frames contained a map of the State of Florida counties boundaries.  Within the county boundary layer we opened the attribute table and added a field called "Area" and used "Calculate Geometry" to populate the Area field with the square mileage of each county.  From this we created a selection of four counties for comparison and saved them to a separate layer.  With this information we were able to create a table to display on the map showing the variations in square mileage for the same counties, in different projections. 

I think I understand projections a bit better after this exercise, but I can see it will be a while before I'm not easily confused by them.