Phone GPS is good to about 5 m, so digits past the fifth decimal add length, not accuracy.
Coordinate converter: turn latitude and longitude into degrees, minutes and seconds, decimal degrees, UTM, MGRS, plus codes, geohash, Maidenhead and more, see how precise they are, and view the spot on a realistic 3D globe or a street map.
Roads and flight paths are longer than a straight line, so real trips take more time.
Distance calculator for latitude and longitude: the great-circle distance between two places in kilometres, miles and nautical miles, the bearing to head, the halfway point, the constant-bearing route, and where you end up after going a set distance in a set direction.
| # | Name | Decimal | Degrees, minutes, seconds | Near |
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Plot coordinates on a map and a realistic 3D globe: paste a list of places in any format, connect them, measure the path and the area, find the center, and download everything as a CSV file.
Latitude says how far north or south of the Equator a place is, from 0° at the Equator to 90° at the poles. Longitude says how far east or west of the Prime Meridian in Greenwich it is, from 0° to 180°. Together they pin down any spot on Earth.
Add the minutes divided by 60 and the seconds divided by 3,600 to the degrees. For 40° 41′ 21″ that is 40 + 41/60 + 21/3600 = 40.6892°. Make the result negative for south latitudes and west longitudes.
In decimal degrees a minus sign stands for west (and for south in latitude), so 74.0445° W is written −74.0445. Forgetting the minus puts a place in the wrong hemisphere, which is one of the most common mistakes.
Each decimal place is ten times finer. Four places pin a spot to about 11 m, five to about 1 m and six to about 11 cm. Phone GPS is only good to a few metres, so more than five or six places adds nothing real.
Along the shortest path over the Earth's surface, on the WGS 84 ellipsoid that GPS uses, with Karney's geodesic method. That is accurate to well under a millimetre. A simple sphere formula can be off by up to about 0.5%.
Flat maps stretch the Earth, so the shortest path, a great circle, bends toward the pole. A route that keeps one compass bearing looks straight on most web maps but is longer, often by several percent on long trips.
UTM splits the world into 60 zones, each 6° of longitude wide, and gives positions in metres east and north. MGRS, used by NATO forces and search and rescue, writes the same grid with letters for the 100 km squares, like 18T WL 80735 04695.
Short codes for a place. Plus codes (like 87G7MXQ4+M5) are Google's free alternative to street addresses. Geohashes are used in databases. Maidenhead locators (like FN20) are what ham radio operators exchange.
No. Conversions and distances are worked out in your browser. Only map pictures are downloaded: the globe images from a public file host and, when you zoom in, from NASA, and the street map from OpenFreeMap.
Learn how latitude and longitude work, how to convert DMS to decimal degrees, how precise each decimal place is, how distances over the Earth are measured, and what UTM, MGRS, plus codes, geohashes and Maidenhead locators are.