Plot [Longitude,Latitude] points on top of a chloropeth/spike map

Show and Tell
1

[I’m new to d3 and ObservableHQ. Posting this just to share in case someone has the same task]

REMAINING QUESTION: Is there an easier way to get the scale and translate parameters from the map or pre-set topoJSON? Or, do we just need to know that counties-albers-10m.json needs

d3.geoAlbersUsa().scale(1300).translate([487.5, 305])

GOAL: I wanted to take the spike map from mbostock and overlay some extra points, where I just have the Longitude and Latitude.

INTERMEDIATE STEP: I needed a way to covert the [long,lat] coordinates to the x,y coordinates in the USA map. I just didn’t know the right command.

ANSWER:
This didn’t work: projection = d3.geoAlbersUsa() // cities are off a few inches
This does work: projection = d3.geoAlbersUsa().scale(1300).translate([487.5, 305]) which is well documented here: U.S. Map / D3 / Observable and here: GitHub - topojson/us-atlas: Pre-built TopoJSON from the U.S. Census Bureau.

See the Code:

Once I set it correctly, projection.centroid(GeoJSONObject) returned the x,y coordinates in the right pixel viewport for the Choropleth / D3 / Observable and Spike Map / D3 / Observable

Time spent: About 1.5hrs of happy learning and reading the d3-geo docs.

2

I’m kinda confused now about the projections.

I think the counties-albers-10m.json is right as above, but now I see some people using this:

us = d3.json('https://pbogden.com/mapping/data/topojson/us-10m.json')
projection = d3.geoAlbersUsa().scale(1280).translate([480, 300])

from here: My U.S. Map (Canvas) / pbogden / Observable

OR

us = d3.json("https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/us-atlas@1/us/10m.json")

from Have you heard of Hunt Brothers Pizza? / Robert Lesser / Observable

So, it seems like sometimes we use the (487.5, 305), and sometimes the (480,300).

Figured it out:

the us-10m.json is an older version of npm/us-atlas that (presumably) uses that projection.
See

Confusing, but normal version change issues.

3

Found this notebook that also uses the d3.geoAlbers().scale(1300).translate([487.5, 305])

4

The scale/translation is a bit of an arbitrary choice. You should look at the source details of a specific map to be sure about it.

Be warned also that these are a spherical-earth version of a conic equal-area projection. They are not quite equal-area for an ellipsoid of revolution, and won’t precisely match ellipsoidal projections used in other software.