**DISCLAIMER!!**
**I’m not asking y’all to do classwork for me**
I just have a question to better understand geography. So we’re learning about great circles and such and how great circles bisect the earth and all that and anything that doesn’t equally bisect the earth is a small circle. North to south pole great circle. Equator is a great circle. My question is, how does that relate to flight navigation? I understand that great circles offer the shortest distance but how? And why? Some graphs from the lecture video I watch with a straight line path visually match the distance of the arc. Does the rotation of the earth also play a factor in this as well? And what is the rhumb line exactly?
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Equator is a great circle, but if you walk due east constantly at any other latitude, your path is a circle, but you’ll have to curve to stay pointing east. For an extreme example, imagine you’re 10 meters from the south pole, if you walk perfectly east, the pole stays 10 meters away from you, and is always on your right side. That’s a small circle. If you were to maintain some other heading, like 85 degrees (5 degrees to the left of east), that’s a rhumb line, and you’d spiral away from the pole.
If you look at a map that shows the border between day and night, that wavy line on the map represents the great circle that separates daytime from nighttime.
As for how it relates to navigation, if you take a string and pull it tight between two points on a globe, that path is part of a great circle. When you unwrap the globe to fit on a flat map, it gets distorted(unless it also happens to be the equator or due north/south, which is still straight on a mercator projection).
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