If the world is round can we make any point of the world the center in maps? Or is there a specific reason all the world maps show the continents in the same orientation?
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Sort of related: I’ve always been curious as to why the Northern Hemisphere is portrayed “on top”. Is it just because most of the navigators making maps lived on that hemisphere and decided they were on top of the countries they were sailing to? I heard ancient Persians (or Chinese?) depicted “up/top” as the direction the sun came from, so a map would unfurl like a scroll with eastern areas on top and westernmost was at the bottom, where the sun sank. Which kind of makes sense, all choices considered. Why *not* have East be the top?
In sci-fi, Earth is also always depicted (on approach from space) as the current Arctic-on-top view. But I wonder if alien “maps” would agree with this arbitrary perspective. Our view might look upside-down to them. Or they might have Earth recorded in its relation to the Galactic Plane, in which case the Mercator Map would be tilted at a 60° or 30° angle to its current framing (depending on whether they view Earth as ‘above’ or ‘below’ the midplane).
I guess it’s all a matter of perspective–that of the mapmaker.
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