 Conformal map of a segment complement to a punctured disk

On $\mathbb{C}\setminus [-1,1]$, take the principal square root with positive real part. The Möbius transformation $(z-1)/(z+1)$ has image $(\mathbb{C}\setminus (-\infty ,0])\setminus \{1\}$. The principal square root therefore maps to the right half-plane with $1$ omitted, and the final Möbius transformation gives exactly $0<|w|<1$. The inverse is $z=-(w+w^{-1})/2$. Adding $\infty$ to the source on the Riemann sphere fills the missing value $w=0$ and gives a conformal map onto the full disk. Without $\infty$, a loop surrounding the segment has nonzero winding number, so the source is not a simply connected space and cannot be conformally equivalent to a disk.