Mercator Geocoin (Antique Silver)

The Mercator Geocoin was designed by the geocacher technetium who minted the coin together with the Geocoinshop.

The idea of the geocoin was to honer Gerardus Mercator who was a cartographer, philosopher and mathematician. 2012 marked the 500th anniversary of Mercator's birth. Born on 5 March 1512 in Rupelmonde (Belgium) he would had been 500 Years old on the day the geocoin was released for purchase.

Gerardus Mercator is best known for his work in cartography, in particular the world map of 1569 based on a new projection which represented sailing courses of constant bearing as straight lines. He was also the first to use the term "atlas" for a collection of maps.

The Mercator Projection

The Mercator projection is a cylindrical map projection presented by the Flemish geographer and cartographer Gerardus Mercator in 1569. It became the standard map projection for nautical purposes because of its ability to represent lines of constant course, known as rhumb lines or loxodromes, as straight segments that conserve the angles with the meridians. While the linear scale is equal in all directions around any point, thus preserving the angles and the shapes of small objects (which makes the projection conformal), the Mercator projection distorts the size of objects as the latitude increases from the Equator to the poles, where the scale becomes infinite. So, for example, landmasses such as Greenland and Antarctica appear much larger than they actually are relative to land masses near the equator, such as Central Africa.

Pictures and information taken from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page

About the Mercator Geocoin :

In total seven different finishings were minted for the Mercator Geocoin. The coins are listed and shown below:

• Mercator Geocoin (antique silver) RE
• Mercator Geocoin (antique gold) RE
• Mercator Geocoin (polished silver) XLE 75
• Mercator Geocoin (polished gold) XLE 75
• Mercator Geocoin (antique copper/antique silver) XLE 75
• Mercator Geocoin (antique silver/antique gold) XLE 75
• Mercator Geocoin (antique silver/polished copper) AE

Mercator Geocoin (antique silver) - regular edition

The Mercator Geocoin is a geocoin out of the personal collection of Geo-Dragonchild. The aim of this geocoin is to please everyone who looks at this beautiful geocoin and discovered it