National Atlas Projections... driving me crazy!

[Kelly Koehn]

I've been working with mapserver for quite some time now and I thought I'd made some strides in the areas of projections but I seem to have went into it all backwards.  I started out with the National Atlas datasets for counties and states.  I've come to the conclusion that the projection they want you to use is 'latlong', ellps is 'GRS80', and datum is 'NAD83'.  The names are 'statesp020' and 'countyp020' I believe.

This is all fine and dandy except unless you project the map as LCC it seems to be vertically challenged.  For instance, the county that I live in (Sedgwick, in Kansas) is not a rectangle.. its square.  I've found some examples of the lat/long to LCC projection but most seem a bit foggy.

My real question has to do with the whole 'lat/long to meters' conversion and how to make heads or tails of the 'cs2cs' program that supposedly converts the values.    Is there some magic trick to this program that I'm not finding?  

I have some other questions about exactly what the lat_0, lat_1, lat_2, lon_0 values should be for the LCC projection but I'll save those for another time.

Any help would be great! I'm about ready to rip my hair out!

Kelly
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