[postgis-users] How to add circle to Postgis database?

[Brent Wood]

OK, I've trimmed all the other content, but my request is slightly off the main
subject.

Does anyone have any comments/advice on what I am doing in this subject area?
The discusison so far suggests I could usefully learm something here :-)


So far I've used a local custom equal area projection (Albers EA from memory) I
created for my purposes.

I was looking at the recorded start positions for fishing trawls along with the
distance towed and gear width to derive an estimated swept area held as a
circle centred on the start point. As I want the circles to represent a
comparable area whether they at lat 20S or 60S, I used an equal area projection
to create them.

Mu limited understanding was that despite the circles being defined by a
radius, an equal area was better than equidistant for this.

I'm storing them as lat/long (EPSG:4326 projection with longs 0-360 as they
cross the 180 meridian... sigh...). In this projection the circles display as
ellipses, exactly as they should, but this does confuse some around here :-)


Is there a better way to achieve this?

Thanks,

  Brent