I can never get my head around these units of measure. Often referenced in terms of resolution of the eye or a telescope. What the hell is an arcsecond?
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Why is a circle 360°? Because its an antiprime. It can be devided evenly with many numbers like: 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9 and their products. Its a highly composite number. So when we are dividing circles having 360 for the whole is comfortable. Unlike grad which makes it 400 to lose all this advantage just because the right angle should be 100.
Why same reason why our timekeeping is in base 60. 60 mins in an hour and 60s in a min. 60 is also highly composite.
So instead of writing small angels like 12.48829° we can keep this nice property and devide 1° into 60′ arcminutes. And an arcminute into 60″ arcseconds. So 1″ is 1/3600 of 1°.
Degrees are useful as a human way of measuring angles, same reason why we don’t measure time as “seconds since the big bang” or 21.68158h. We don’t want to fuck around with decimals so lets use highly composite numbers.
If you are mathematically working with angles, you’ll use radians anyway.
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