Calculating distance and bearing

Now that you have the data, you can do some interesting things with it. For your sailboat, you'll need to use your current location and a desired new location to give your sailboat a distance and a bearing.

Longitude from your GPS device is a measure of where you are on the earth with respect to east/west. Latitude is a measure of where you are with respect to north/south. These readings are normally given in degrees (considering the fact that the globe is round, so the readings start at 0 degrees and end at 360 degrees.) Since the earth is very large, the readings also include minutes and seconds, where a single degree is divided into 60 minutes and each minute is divided into 60 seconds.

In order to calculate distance and bearing, you're going to start with longitudinal and latitudinal positions on the earth's surface in the degrees.minutes.seconds format. You'll then translate these values into a digital degree format and use the haversine formula to calculate...