Nautical chart a Mercator's projection map, a square is a square no matter where you are on the chart, but a square on the Arctic Circle is much bigger than a square at the equator, even though both occupy the same number of degrees on the globe. The result of this is that scale in a nautical chart is dependent on latitude. In practical use, this is less of a problem than it sounds. One minute of latitude is, for practical purposes, a nautical mile. Distances in nautical miles can therefore be measured on the latitude gradations printed on the side of
Longitude magnetic fields is used as a reference instead. In the case of the Sun, even this criterion fails (because its magnetosphere is very complex and does not really rotate in a steady fashion), and an agreed-upon value for the rotation of its equator is used instead. For "planetographic longitude", west longitudes (i.e., longitudes measured positively to the west) are used when the rotation is prograde, and east longitudes (i.e., longitudes measured positively to the east) when the rotation is retrograde. In simpler terms, imagine a distant, non-orbiting observer viewing a planet as it rotates. Also suppose that this observer is