📍 Coordinate Distance

haversine · great-circle · km / mi / nmi · initial bearing · swap

Advertisement

Flat maps lie about distance; the shortest path between two points on a sphere is the arc of the great circle through them. This page computes that arc with the haversine formula on the mean Earth radius 6,371.0088 km — accurate to a few tenths of a percent everywhere (the true ellipsoid differs by up to 0.5% — stated, not hidden) — plus the initial bearing, the compass heading at departure, which is not the heading you arrive on.

—

Haversine instead of the spherical law of cosines

Both give the same arc; the haversine form is used because it stays numerically stable for short hops — the cosine version loses precision to floating-point rounding when the two points are close (the famous "1-metre error at 5 km"). The radius 6,371.0088 km is the IUGG mean: equatorial points are ~0.3% further from the centre than polar ones, so a WGS-84 ellipsoid calculator (Vincenty) will differ from this by up to about 0.5% — acceptable for curiosity, not for surveying.

Part of Everyday Tools. Like everything on tukuk.org: free, no account, no tracking.

Advertisement
Advertisement