Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
The history of longitude describes the centuries-long effort by astronomers, cartographers and navigators to discover a means of determining the longitude of any given place on Earth. The measurement of longitude is important to both cartography and navigation. In particular, for safe ocean navigation, knowledge of both latitude and longitude ...
A diagram of a typical nautical sextant, a tool used in celestial navigation to measure the angle between two objects viewed by means of its optical sight. Celestial navigation, also known as astronavigation, is the practice of position fixing using stars and other celestial bodies that enables a navigator to accurately determine their actual current physical position in space or on the ...
Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time is a 1995 best-selling book by Dava Sobel about John Harrison, an 18th-century clockmaker who created the first clock ( chronometer) sufficiently accurate to be used to determine longitude at sea—an important development in navigation.
Graticule (cartography) Map of Europe with a 30° graticule in dark gray. A graticule (from Latin crāticula 'grill/grating'), on a map, is a graphical depiction of a coordinate system as a grid of lines, each line representing a constant coordinate value. [1] It is thus a form of isoline, and is commonly found on maps of many kinds, at scales ...
Equirectangular projection. Equirectangular projection of the world; the standard parallel is the equator (plate carrée projection). Height map of planet Earth at 2km per pixel, including oceanic bathymetry information, normalized as 8-bit grayscale. Because of its easy conversion between x, y pixel information and lat-lon, maps like these are ...
It included an index of place-names, with the latitude and longitude of each place to guide the search, scale, conventional signs with legends, and the practice of orienting maps so that north is at the top and east to the right of the map—an almost universal custom today.
Geodetic coordinates. Geodetic coordinates are a type of curvilinear orthogonal coordinate system used in geodesy based on a reference ellipsoid . They include geodetic latitude (north/south) ϕ, longitude (east/west) λ, and ellipsoidal height h (also known as geodetic height [1] ). The triad is also known as Earth ellipsoidal coordinates [2 ...
In cartography, a map projection is any of a broad set of transformations employed to represent the curved two-dimensional surface of a globe on a plane. [ 1][ 2][ 3] In a map projection, coordinates, often expressed as latitude and longitude, of locations from the surface of the globe are transformed to coordinates on a plane. [ 4][ 5 ...