This is no ordinary geocaching trading item!

Mercator Geocoin (Antique Silver) is a Mercator Geocoin Travel Bug, traveling from geocache to geocache on a very specific mission.

If you do not intend to log your visit on the Geocaching.com web site, please DO NOT TAKE THIS ITEM. Its travels and its progress requires you to log that it is being taken from this geocache. You will also need to log when you place it in another geocache. It's easy!

If you are willing to log your part of this Trackable's journey and place it in another geocache as soon as possible (after you log your find), grab it from this geocache.

My Current Goal:

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