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Null Island is the location at zero degrees latitude and zero degrees longitude), i.e., where the prime meridian and the equator intersect. Since there is no landmass located at these coordinates, it is not an actual island. The name is often used in mapping software as a placeholder to help find and correct database entries that have ...
Longitude measures the rotational angle between the zero meridian and the measured point. By convention for the Earth, Moon and Sun, it is expressed in degrees ranging from −180° to +180°. For other bodies a range of 0° to 360° is used. For this purpose, it is necessary to identify a zero meridian, which for Earth is usually the Prime ...
Io's prime meridian, like that of Earth's moon, is defined so that it runs through the middle of the face that is always turned towards Jupiter (the near side, known as the subjovian hemisphere). [41] Ganymede's prime meridian is defined such that the crater Anat is at 128° W, and the 0° longitude runs through the middle of the subjovian ...
Road sign marking the equator near Nanyuki, Kenya. The latitude of the Earth's equator is, by definition, 0° (zero degrees) of arc.The equator is one of the five notable circles of latitude on Earth; the other four are the two polar circles (the Arctic Circle and the Antarctic Circle) and the two tropical circles (the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn).
A geographic coordinate system (GCS) is a spherical or geodetic coordinate system for measuring and communicating positions directly on Earth as latitude and longitude. [1] It is the simplest, oldest and most widely used type of the various spatial reference systems that are in use, and forms the basis for most others.
The WGS 84 meridian of zero longitude is the IERS Reference Meridian, [8] 5.3 arc seconds or 102 metres (335 ft) east of the Greenwich meridian at the latitude of the Royal Observatory. [ 9 ] [ 10 ] (This is related to the fact that the local gravity field at Greenwich does not point exactly through the Earth's center of mass, but rather ...
The most important reason for the 5.3 seconds of longitude offset between the IERS Reference Meridian and the Airy transit circle is that the observations with the transit circle were based on the local vertical, while the IERS Reference is a geodetic longitude, that is, the plane of the meridian contains the center of mass of the Earth.
The position of a point along the meridian at a given longitude is given by its latitude, measured in angular degrees north or south of the Equator. On a Mercator projection or on a Gall-Peters projection, each meridian is perpendicular to all circles of latitude. Assuming a spherical Earth, a meridian is a great semicircle on Earth's