Stereographic Projection - Properties

Properties

The stereographic projection defined in the preceding section sends the "south pole" (0, 0, −1) to (0, 0), the equator to the unit circle, the southern hemisphere to the region inside the circle, and the northern hemisphere to the region outside the circle.

The projection is not defined at the projection point N = (0, 0, 1). Small neighborhoods of this point are sent to subsets of the plane far away from (0, 0). The closer P is to (0, 0, 1), the more distant its image is from (0, 0) in the plane. For this reason it is common to speak of (0, 0, 1) as mapping to "infinity" in the plane, and of the sphere as completing the plane by adding a "point at infinity". This notion finds utility in projective geometry and complex analysis. On a merely topological level, it illustrates how the sphere is homeomorphic to the one point compactification of the plane.

In Cartesian coordinates a point P(x, y, z) on the sphere and its image P′(X, Y) on the plane either both are rational points or none of them:

Stereographic projection is conformal, meaning that it preserves the angles at which curves cross each other (see figures). On the other hand, stereographic projection does not preserve area; in general, the area of a region of the sphere does not equal the area of its projection onto the plane. The area element is given in (X, Y) coordinates by

Along the unit circle, where X2 + Y2 = 1, there is no infinitesimal distortion of area. Near (0, 0) areas are distorted by a factor of 4, and near infinity areas are distorted by arbitrarily small factors.

The metric is given in (X, Y) coordinates by

and is the unique formula found in Bernhard Riemann's Habilitationsschrift on the foundations of geometry, delivered at Göttingen in 1854, and entitled Über die Hypothesen welche der Geometrie zu Grunde liegen.

No map from the sphere to the plane can be both conformal and area-preserving. If it were, then it would be a local isometry and would preserve Gaussian curvature. The sphere and the plane have different Gaussian curvatures, so this is impossible.

The conformality of the stereographic projection implies a number of convenient geometric properties. Circles on the sphere that do not pass through the point of projection are projected to circles on the plane. Circles on the sphere that do pass through the point of projection are projected to straight lines on the plane. These lines are sometimes thought of as circles through the point at infinity, or circles of infinite radius.

All lines in the plane, when transformed to circles on the sphere by the inverse of stereographic projection, intersect each other at infinity. Parallel lines, which do not intersect in the plane, are tangent at infinity. Thus all lines in the plane intersect somewhere in the sphere — either transversally at two points, or tangently at infinity. (Similar remarks hold about the real projective plane, but the intersection relationships are different there.)

The loxodromes of the sphere map to curves on the plane of the form

where the parameter a measures the "tightness" of the loxodrome. Thus loxodromes correspond to logarithmic spirals. These spirals intersect radial lines in the plane at equal angles, just as the loxodromes intersect meridians on the sphere at equal angles.

The stereographic projection relates to the plane inversion in a simple way. Let P and Q be two points on the sphere with projections P' and Q' on the plane. Then P' and Q' are inversive images of each other in the image of the equatorial circle if and only if P and Q are reflections of each other in the equatorial plane.
In other words, if:

• P is a point on the sphere, but not a 'north pole' N and not its antipode, the 'south pole' S,
• P' is the image of P in a stereographic projection with the projection point N and
• P" is the image of P in a stereographic projection with the projection point S,

then P' and P" are inversive images of each other in the unit circle.