Eli5 why there are more lines of Longitude then Latitude
In: 35
TLDR:
Latitude measures angles away from the equator. You can’t get any further away than the north or south pole, which are 90 degrees from the equator. So Latitude stops at 90 degrees.
Longitude measures the angle away from the line connecting the North and South pole that runs through Greenwich England. The furthest you can get from this line is on the opposite side of the earth at 180 degrees from Greenwich. So Longitude stops at 180 degrees.
So it only takes a total of 90 degrees North and 90 degrees south of the equator to complete the grid of Latitude (180 total). Where as it takes 180 degrees East and 180 degrees west to complete the grid of Longitude (360 degrees total).
The earth spins around an imaginary line through the center of the earth and out to what we call North and South poles. These poles make dividing the earth into coordinates pretty easy.
Latitude tells us how close we are to the poles. Longitude tells us where we are around the earth.
Latitude measures the angle between two lines joined together at the center of the earth. The first line goes to the surface of the earth at the equator. ( The equator was picked because it is the furthest you can get from the poles.) We set this as ground 0. The second line from the center of the earth goes to where you are on the surface. If you were at one of the poles, you are as far away from the equator as you can get. If you took out your protractor and put it at the center of the earth and measured those two lines, you’d get 90 degrees. So Latitude maxes out at 90. We add North or South to tell us which side of the equator we are measuring on.
At this point, all we know now is that we are somewhere on a line that circles around the earth at a particular Latitude.
Longitude tells us where we are on that circle. If we use the poles as the center of our Latitude circle, we can measure the angle between two lines radiating out like spokes on a bicycle. These lines start at one pole, follow the curve of the earth and end at the other pole. The first line runs through Greenwich England, and is our starting point and we call angle 0. The second line runs through where we are along that circle of Latitude. We could potentially be up to 360 degrees away from Greenwich if you keep measuring around in one direction, but because 180 degrees is as far from Greenwich line as we can get (on the opposite side of the earth from Greenwich) we stop there and say whether we measure going East, or measure going West. So Longitude maxes out at 180 degrees east or west.
The reason why Latitude has less lines is because there isnt as big of an angle away from our start point compared to Longitude.
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