Rectilinear projection

Rectilinear projection is a way of making flat pictures out of things we see in the world. Imagine your eyes are a camera taking a picture of a really big thing, like a building or a mountain. When you look at it straight on, it looks like a rectangle in your view, right?

That's sort of what rectilinear projection does. It takes what we see in the world, which is round and curved in all different directions, and straightens it out so that everything looks like it fits into a rectangle, just like a picture.

It's like when you take a piece of paper and draw a picture of your house on it. You can't fit everything in because the paper is too small, so you have to decide what parts are most important and draw them. Rectilinear projection is kind of like that, but it's more complicated because it's trying to fit a lot more information into the rectangle than just one picture of your house.

People use rectilinear projection a lot when they make maps or when they take pictures with cameras. The pictures might not look exactly like what we see in real life, but they're really helpful for showing us things that are far away or for remembering what a place looked like.