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Decimal degrees (DD) is a notation for expressing latitude and longitude geographic coordinates as decimal fractions of a degree. DD are used in many geographic information systems (GIS), web mapping applications such as OpenStreetMap, and GPS devices. Decimal degrees are an alternative to using degrees-minutes-seconds notation. As with ...
The numerical values for latitude and longitude can occur in a number of different units or formats: [2] sexagesimal degree: degrees, minutes, and seconds : 40° 26′ 46″ N 79° 58′ 56″ W; 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 ...
Minutes and seconds need not be specified. If no degrees are specified then a value of zero is assumed. This template does not attempt to trap invalid values and results in this case might be undefined. The decimal precision of the result is determined by the value assigned rnd, which defaults to 7.
However, when it is inconvenient to use base-60 for minutes and seconds, positions are frequently expressed as decimal fractional degrees to an equal amount of precision. Degrees given to three decimal places ( 1 / 1000 of a degree) have about 1 / 4 the precision of degrees-minutes-seconds ( 1 / 3600 of a degree) and ...
The last two examples illustrate what happens if x is a rather small number. In the second from last example, x = 1.110111⋯111 × 2 −50 ; 15 bits altogether. The binary is replaced very crudely by a single power of 2 (in this example, 2 −49) and its decimal equivalent is used.
The magnitude of such precision (152 decimal places) can be put into context by the fact that the circumference of the largest known object, the observable universe, can be calculated from its diameter (93 billion light-years) to a precision of less than one Planck length (at 1.6162 × 10 −35 meters, the shortest unit of length expected to be ...
In both cases, only minutes and seconds use sexagesimal notation—angular degrees can be larger than 59 (one rotation around a circle is 360°, two rotations are 720°, etc.), and both time and angles use decimal fractions of a second.
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.