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How do I figure out my latitude and longitude?

A friend of mine has been talking about "geolocation" and tells me that I simply must know my latitude and longitude. I have absolutely no idea how to do that, and figure that there must be some solution on the Web, but I haven't found it. Can you help?

Dave's Answer:

Sure! While you'd think that the popular mapping services would be able to offer up the latitude and longitude of a given spot, it's surprising to find that you have to go a bit further off teh beaten track to find a mapping program that includes lat long.

I found that Maporama offers just that service, and it's pretty easy to work with. To demonstrate, let's figure out the lat / long of Apple's corporate headquarters in Cupertino, California.

The first step is to enter the address on the home page:

Now click on "Go" and you'll get a pretty typical little map with navigational tools:

Maporama: Map of Apple's World Headquarters in Cupertino, California

Nothing new yet, but if you look on the lower left corner of that page, you'll see exactly the information desired:

Maporama: Latitude and Longitude of Apple's Corporate HQ

That's it! Now you know that Apple's corporate offices are located at exactly 37° 19' , -122° 1', 37.332 , -122.031.

That should help you out!

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Categorized: Computer and Internet Basics (Article 6543)
Tagged: latitude, longitude, online mapping
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Comments

Dave,

I do volunteer work in a rural area where not every location has an address. The website www.mapbuilder.net has the same feature as maporama (getting lat/lon from an address) and goes one step further.

When you move mapbuilder's pointer, the new lat/lon is shown which can be a metro parking lot or, just as easily, the beach at Crooked Creek Lake where Armstrong Habitat for Humanity holds their annual triathlon as a fundraiser.

The downside of mapbuilder is that I haven't figured out their method of archiving maps. I've developed my own workaround, embedding lat/lon and a caption into a Superpages.com URL. It works!

Sample: m18.local4all.com = Crooked Creek beach (as rural as it gets!)

I'm the race director and it saves me tons of time not having to give extra directions to first-time participants.

Archivable, Findable, and Zoomable!

I enjoy getting your RSS, keep up the good work.

Carl Bromley
Local4All.com

Posted by: Carl Bromley at May 11, 2006 10:49 AM

I have a lot to say, but ...

I have a lot to say, and questions of my own for that matter, but most of all I'd like to say thank you for all your efforts on this Web site by buying you a chai!

I do have a comment, now that you mention it!