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The concepts of degrees, minutes, and seconds—as they relate to the measure of both angles and time—derive from Babylonian astronomy and time-keeping. Influenced by the Sumerians, the ancient Babylonians divided the Sun's perceived motion across the sky over the course of one full day into 360 degrees.
With the invention of the metric system, based on powers of ten, there was an attempt to replace degrees by decimal "degrees" in France and nearby countries, [note 3] where the number in a right angle is equal to 100 gon with 400 gon in a full circle (1° = 10 ⁄ 9 gon). This was called grade (nouveau) or grad.
The angle is typically measured in degrees from the mark of number 12 clockwise. The time is usually based on a 12-hour clock. A method to solve such problems is to consider the rate of change of the angle in degrees per minute. The hour hand of a normal 12-hour analogue clock turns 360° in 12 hours (720 minutes) or 0.5° per minute.
This notation leads to the modern signs for degrees, minutes, and seconds. The same minute and second nomenclature is also used for units of time, and the modern notation for time with hours, minutes, and seconds written in decimal and separated from each other by colons may be interpreted as a form of sexagesimal notation.
{{Deg2DMS |positive decimal degrees| p =precision| sup =ms}} |p= is optional and defaults to 3. It is the number of decimal digits that the seconds are rounded to. |sup= is optional and changes the default apostrophe-format for arcminutes and arcseconds (1° 2′ 3″) to the m-s-format for arcminutes and arcseconds (1° 2 m 3 s).
Since a complete circle contains 24 h of right ascension or 360° (degrees of arc), 1 / 24 of a circle is measured as 1 h of right ascension, or 15°; 1 / 1440 of a circle is measured as 1 m of right ascension, or 15 minutes of arc (also written as 15′); and 1 / 86400 of a circle contains 1 s of right ascension, or 15 ...
The Babylonian system of mathematics was a sexagesimal (base 60) numeral system.From this we derive the modern-day usage of 60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour, and 360 degrees in a circle. [8]
degrees and decimal minutes: 40° 26.767′ N 79° 58.933′ W; decimal degrees: +40.446 -79.982; There are 60 minutes in a degree and 60 seconds in a minute. Therefore, to convert from a degrees minutes seconds format to a decimal degrees format, one may use the formula