Lattitude & longitude marked in map and how it used?
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take a flat piece of paper and draw a grid of horizontal and vertical lines on it. The horizontal centerline is your equator. Number the lines above it in escalating sequence, and the lines below it in escalating sequence. The lines above the equator are North, and those below it South. Do the same for the vertical centerline which will now serve as your meridian. To the left is West and to the right is East.
This is the basics of the system, a graph on a map.
The earth is not flat though, sorry it just isnt
So transfer this concept to a sphere.
They form a Geographic Coordinate System that is used for pointing out the locations of things. Sort of like giving a street address for your house, except global and for points on the earth’s surface in general. They are measured in Degrees ° (biggest), Minutes ‘, and Seconds” (smallest), and they always at least have the Degrees and Minutes given (Seconds give you the most accurate location).
Latitude = the parallel lines on the map that run from East-West (“left-to-right”). There are about 69 miles between each degree of Latitude. 0 degrees is the Equator (cuts the Earth’s north half off from its south half). About 23 Degrees 26 Minutes North is the Tropic of Cancer, which is as far north as the sun will travel in a year, and about 23 Degrees 26 Minutes South is the Tropic of Capricorn which is the farthest south the sun will travel in a year.
Longitude = the lines on the map that go from North-South (“top-to-bottom”). They actually meet at the north and south poles of the globe, so they are spread out at the equator and get closer together as you go north or south. 0 degrees is the Prime Meridian, that’s where the central world time zone is (Greenwich Meantime or now UTC). 180 is the International Date Line, this is where a day ends or begins on the earth’s surface (so if you’re on a flight and you fly over this you are basically going forward or backward 24 hours).
You will always get two pairs of numbers in coordinates. One is the latitude (lat) and one is the longitude (long). So 38° 53′ 51.635″ N 77° 2’ 11.507″ W would be read as “38 degrees 53 minutes 51.635 seconds North [of the equator] and 77 degrees 2 minutes and 11.507 seconds West [of the Prime Meridian]”. You might also see this as Decimal Degrees: 38.897957, -77.036560 (where a positive latitude is North, negative is South; positive longitude is East and negative is West).
That’s a very simple explanation for the most common system a person usually encounters. There are actually a few different coordinate systems out there that don’t use degrees at all for measurement (some use feet, some use kilometers), but they’re usually used by governments for stuff like emergency planning.
Take a ball, mark two points opposite each other. Draw a straight line from one to the other(great circle). This is a line of longitude, if you draw more of them and assign each one a number you have a way to describe how far east/west a point on the surface of the ball is.
Set the ball on a table with one of the points touching the table. Draw a circle around the sphere staying a fixed distance above the surface of the table. This is a line of latitude. If you draw more of them and assign each one a number you can describe how far north/south a point on the surface of the ball is.
If you have a mercator projection map, it’s a bit misleading, because in reality all the vertical lines meet at the poles, which translates to an infinite vertical distance in that projection, so you can’t actually see the poles in a mercator projection, they pick some latitude and cut off everything closer to the poles than that.
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