Also, the sin²(θ/2) form of the haversine avoided addition (which entailedĪn anti-log lookup, the addition, and a log lookup). (real) log of a negative number, the ‘versine’ enabled them to keep trig functions in The height of technology for navigator’s calculations used to be log tables. Latitude/longitude in radians – having found that mixing degrees & radians is often the Note in these scripts, I generally use lat/lon for latitude/longitude in degrees, and φ/λ for Note that angles need to be in radians to pass to trig functions!Ĭonst φ1 = lat1 * Math.PI/180 // φ, λ in radiansĬonst a = Math.sin(Δφ/2) * Math.sin(Δφ/2) +Ĭonst c = 2 * Math.atan2(Math.sqrt(a), Math.sqrt(1-a)) Φ is latitude, λ is longitude, R is earth’s radius (mean radius = 6,371km) Points – that is, the shortest distance over the earth’s surface – giving an ‘as-the-crow-flies’ĭistance between the points (ignoring any hills they fly over, of course!). This uses the ‘ haversine’ formula to calculate the great-circle distance between two signed decimal degrees without compass direction, where negative indicates.deg-min-sec suffixed with N/S/E/W (e.g.Great-circle distance between two pointsĮnter the co-ordinates into the text boxes to try out the calculations. Most purposes… [In fact, the earth is very slightly ellipsoidal using a spherical model gives This page presents a variety of calculations for latitude/longitude points, with the formulas andĪll these formulas are for calculations on the basis of a spherical earth (ignoring ellipsoidalĮffects) – which is accurate enough * for Calculate distance and bearing between two Latitude/Longitude points using haversine formula in JavaScript Movable Type ScriptsĬalculate distance, bearing and more between Latitude/Longitude points

Distance from and to locations