Coordinate Systems

The lessons learned this week was extremely valuable. I have been struggling with projections and coordinate systems since I started my intro to GIS course 2 years ago. This week, it was cleared up for me, somewhat. For instance, below, I had to pick a state in the contiguous USA and find a projection that was justifiable in using it for map production. I chose to use the NAD 1983 projection of Texas using a Lambert system. The reason being is that Texas is far too large to fit into a single UTM zone, it actually traversed through about 3 zones in total. The state plane zones were too plentiful to encapsulate all of Texas, so in order to properly project the State a custom projection was used. Searching for the State in the customize projections prompt brought a few options forward that would have been suitable candidates. I think the biggest dilemma for me was whether or not to use Albers or Lambert, my final decision came from the fact that I was working on projecting the proper shape, not necessarily conserving area. The black lines on the map show the geographic coordinate system and the blue grid displays the projected coordinate system at use and how it changes the display picture. This week was challenging in the sense that I wasn't extremely comfortable making the final decisions on the proper projection, after hours of research I feel much more confident in my abilities to properly choose projections for study areas.