Lat and Long

Knowing the latitude and longitude of where you live is probably not everyone’s interest but for those of us with computer guided telescopes those settings can increase accuracy; other than that, hey, it’s cool to know!

So how do you find the lat & long for your location? Easy! if you happen to have a GPS device go to the location and use the GPS to determine the latitude and longitude. If you don’t have one, then you can use something like maporama to get the exact lat & long of any street address in the world. If you live in Australia, Victoria you can also use the land.vic.gov.au site (as well as get a very accurate property map).

Using maporama I got a Lat of -37° xx’ 17″ and 145° xx’ 33″ Long, and using land.vic.gov.au I got the same Lat and 145° xx’ 32″ (only 1 sec difference) not bad for maporama with a worldwide street database!

Related links: John Harrison and the Longitude Problem

chris on January 28th 2005 in Uncategorized

2 Responses to “Lat and Long”

  1. Benjamin responded on 28 Jan 2005 at 1:27 pm #

    What kind of telescope do you have?

  2. Chris responded on 30 Jan 2005 at 9:16 pm #

    I’ve got a Meade ETX-90 (3.5″). It’s a great portable scope with great optics and computer guided control. Not as big (in terms of mirror size) but the great optics and design is enough for studying the moon, planets and the ‘brighter’ deep-sky objects like globular clusters. Meade makes scopes from 3″ to 18″ (and the big ones worth a fortune!)