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Post by Mary on Oct 22, 2009 14:24:30 GMT -5
UNDER CONSTRUCTION
The earth is divided into hemispheres. North and south are divided by the Equator. And east from west is divided by the Prime Meridian.
GPS (global positioning coordinates) are given to us relative to these positions.
There are several formats for writing degrees, all of them appearing in the same Latitude, Longitude order.
DMS Degrees:Minutes:Seconds DM Degrees:Decimal Minutes DD Decimal Degrees
Components of a typical coordinate In its most simple form a coordinate is just a number of degrees. The tricky part comes in when you need to differentiate North/South latitude or West/East longitude, or make the number more digestible by writing it with minutes and seconds instead of as a decimal number.
Degrees The degrees portion of the coordinate is always going to be the easiest to figure out. The degrees is always the left-most whole number.
A sphere is divided into 360 degrees. The number space is divided into two halves, East and West in the case of longitude and North and South in the case of latitude. The maximum ranges are as follows:
Longitude 180 W = -180 180 E = 180 Latitude 90 N = 90 90 S = -90 Technically you could have latitudes greater than 90 or less than -90, but this is an ambiguous case, since there would be an equivalent coordinate with an inverse longitude.
The minimal case is that you have only degrees:
50.21389 or 50.21389N
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