Rectilinear projection

A gnomonic projection, also known as a central projection, gnomic projection, or rectilinear projection, is a perspective projection of a sphere, with center of projection at the sphere's center, onto any plane not passing through the center, most commonly a tangent plane. Under gnomonic projection every great circle on the sphere is projected to a straight line in the plane (a great circle is a geodesic on the sphere, the shortest path between any two points, analogous to a straight line on the plane). More generally, a gnomonic projection can be taken of any n-dimensional hypersphere onto a hyperplane.