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The haversine formula determines the great-circle distance between two points on a sphere given their longitudes and latitudes.Important in navigation, it is a special case of a more general formula in spherical trigonometry, the law of haversines, that relates the sides and angles of spherical triangles.
The distance between any two points on the real line is the absolute value of the numerical difference of their coordinates, their absolute difference. Thus if p {\displaystyle p} and q {\displaystyle q} are two points on the real line, then the distance between them is given by: [ 1 ]
A diagram illustrating great-circle distance (drawn in red) between two points on a sphere, P and Q. Two antipodal points, u and v are also shown. The great-circle distance, orthodromic distance, or spherical distance is the distance between two points on a sphere, measured along the great-circle arc between them. This arc is the shortest path ...
Finding the geodesic between two points on the Earth, the so-called inverse geodetic problem, was the focus of many mathematicians and geodesists over the course of the 18th and 19th centuries with major contributions by Clairaut, [5] Legendre, [6] Bessel, [7] and Helmert English translation of Astron. Nachr. 4, 241–254 (1825).
The simplest method is to use finite difference approximations. A simple two-point estimation is to compute the slope of a nearby secant line through the points (x, f(x)) and (x + h, f(x + h)). [1] Choosing a small number h, h represents a small change in x, and it can be either positive or negative.
Angular separation between points A and B as seen from O. To derive the equation that describes the angular separation of two points located on the surface of a sphere as seen from the center of the sphere, we use the example of two astronomical objects and observed from the Earth.
atan2(y, x) returns the angle θ between the positive x-axis and the ray from the origin to the point (x, y), confined to (−π, π].Graph of (,) over /. In computing and mathematics, the function atan2 is the 2-argument arctangent.
Vincenty's formulae are two related iterative methods used in geodesy to calculate the distance between two points on the surface of a spheroid, developed by Thaddeus Vincenty (1975a). They are based on the assumption that the figure of the Earth is an oblate spheroid, and hence are more accurate than methods that assume a spherical Earth, such ...