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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 ...
Great Circle Map Interactive tool for plotting great circle routes on a sphere. Great Circle Mapper Interactive tool for plotting great circle routes. Great Circle Calculator deriving (initial) course and distance between two points. Great Circle Distance Graphical tool for drawing great circles over maps. Also shows distance and azimuth in a ...
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.
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 ...
Its arc length is the great-circle distance between the points (the intrinsic distance on a sphere), and is proportional to the measure of the central angle formed by the two points and the center of the sphere. A great circle is the largest circle that can be drawn on any given sphere. Any diameter of any great circle coincides with a diameter ...
The great-circle distance article gives the formula for calculating the shortest arch length on a sphere about the size of the Earth. That article includes an example of the calculation. That article includes an example of the calculation.
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By this device a great circle can be mapped exactly to a geodesic on an ellipsoid of revolution. There are also several ways of approximating geodesics on a terrestrial ellipsoid (with small flattening) (Rapp 1991, §6); some of these are described in the article on geographical distance.