Sextants are known for theirprecision. The material and design of sextants can rid them of sources of error that would otherwise plague sextant measurements. Metal sextants in particular don't have to deal with issues of refraction, oblateness (a measurement of curvature) of the Earth and data...
If you're a person with normal vision acuity — a rating of 20/20— and you gaze horizontally from around 5 feet (152.4 centimeters) above the ground, you can see about 3 miles (5 kilometers) into the distance, which is the point at which the Earth's curvature bends away so that t...
The formula used in this code only accounts for the UTM zone and hemisphere based on the latitude and longitude values. It does not take into account the curvature of the Earth’s surface, which can lead to inaccuracies in the UTM coordinates. If you need this, then you can use the foll...
Zip back to the ancient world and you'd encounter two basic types of astrolabes. The first type, known as a planispheric astrolabe, helped astronomers calculate the positions of celestial objects. All early astrolabes were of the planispheric sort until seafaring folks saw how useful the inst...
And while military snipers are indeed elite shooters who hide, line up a target in their sights and pull the trigger, there is a lot more to it than that. When a sniper takes a shot, there are countless variables to consider before squeezing the trigger --- wind speed, wind direction,...
Remember that this module is supposed to be usable on different planets. We first convert our deltas to degrees. The latitude means that if we get a positive delta, we go North. A negative one and we go South. With that in mind, we also want to respect the curvature of the earth. ...
To calculate the aspect at each location, a quadratic or biquadratic surface is fitted to the neighborhood cells using the Least Squares Method (LSM). A surface normal is calculated at the cell location from that surface. At the same location, an ellipsoid normal perpendicular to the tangent pl...
Detail how, if Earth's orbit were twice the diameter it is now, that would affect stellar parallax and our ability to measure distances. Why is the earth's orbital velocity fastest at perihelion? How would you calculate the curvature of the Earth? Use these equations: r aphelion = a ( ...
Latitude and longitude coordinates were used to calculate 1,351,406 physical distances considering Earth’s curvature among all 1163 institutions in our analytic sample. After excluding self-relations (i.e., \(i - i\)) and loops (i.e., only \(i - j\) counts, whereas \(j - i\) doe...
Flying non-stop from Detroit to Niagara Falls Now let's assume you have a private jet and you can fly in the fastest possible straight line between Detroit, Michigan and Niagara Falls, Ontario. Because of the curvature of the Earth, the shortest distance is actually the "great circle" dista...