Eli5 why there are more lines of Longitude then Latitude
In: 35
I’m not an expert on this, but I’ll go with basic intuition here.
There is a defined “top” and “bottom” to the earth, as most people understand it. The further north you go, the higher value latitude you find yourself in, ranging from -90 at “true south” to +90 at “true north”. It wouldn’t make sense for you to keep going past north and climb to +180 latitude as you once again approach the equator.
Longitude, however, does not have the same definitive concept of “this is as east as I can get”. It wouldn’t make sense for you to travel east up to 90 degrees and then start counting back down again as you go further east.
That would also cause there to be two points of longitude for each possible degree on a map. The -90,90 latitude system paired with the -180,180 longitude system allows for a simple, relatively intuitive coordinate reference system that will only ever have one location for a corresponding coordinate.
I probably did a bad job of explaining, so someone with the actual history could probably help.
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