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Latitude and Longitude


How do I find my lat and long ?

What is my latitude longitude ?

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Blue direction line ?

Extra decimal places * ?

Ignore the satellite pointing angles until you are familiar with finding your latitude longitude location.  If you want dish pointing select the satellite and click the map afterwards. The fourth/fifth decimal place in the decimal version and adding an extra decimal place to the minutes display may give a false and spurious impression of accuracy.



Instructions to determine your latitude and longitude:

Practice first.  Put your mouse cursor on the map, click down, and drag the map. The map display will move. Move so that your selected point is in the centre. The latitude and longitude of the centre of the map is then shown below the map.

To refine the accuracy of your site latitude and longitude, click on the plus sign + on the left side of the map.  The map scale will change so that you can home in accurately on your location. Repeat. At the top right click to choose the Map, Satellite or Terrain options to see the satellite photo image of the ground. You may left click your mouse and drag the satellite map.

Next step:  If you want satellite TV dish pointing, select the satellite at the lower left pull down menu box and click the map again (to recalculate the pointing angles)

Latitude is North - South ( up and down ! ).  Longitude is West - East ( sideways !).  Latitude is zero on the equator and positive in the northern hemisphere and negative in the southern hemisphere.     Longitude is zero on the prime meridian - home of Greenwich Mean Time and is positive to the east, across Europe and Asia.  Longitude is negative to the west, across the Atlantic and the Americas.    Read about the history of latitude and longitude. Look here for my animated views of the Planet Earth.

Write down your lat/long location co-ordinates for future reference.
Try comparing with your sat-nav GPS navigator tracker receiver position ?.

If the map shows "GREY OOPS! error" it means that my daily Google money limit (8am - 8am GMT) has run out.  It costs me a lot to provide this page.  4000 map queries is 28$. Sorry.

25 Jan 2011: The underlying map drawing software of this page has been upgraded to V3. Please tell me if you have any problems eric@satsig.net

At the top left of the map is now a Man icon, If orange it means that a Google Street View is available. Click on it and drag over to where you want to look at.  This feature was removed in Dec 2018 due to the cost of providing it.


27th April 2006: GPS sat-nav map type display is now added.  The whole map system has been upgraded to Version 2 which now includes detailed street maps for UK, France, Spain and Europe road maps with towns - even in Hungary, which suits me for my cycling holidays!.  6th June 2006:  I have added satellite dish angle calculation.  Its use is optional.  Select the satellite you want to see and then doubleclick on the map.

Go to maps to see an index page with a listing of all the map pages.   Tell me if you want a page made for your country.


Navigation links, to my  satellite dish pointing angle calculator

 explanation of latitude and longitude

Discussion forum for latitude longitude finder page

Larger satellite photo image viewer for finding your home as seen from space



This page costs me money to provide and therefore has a limited daily usage.  Prior to its daily reset at 8am GMT the mapping may run out of its daily usage allowance and stop working. Sorry.

This page is under progressive development and I would appreciate your feedback and comments.  I made an update which incorporated about 195 marker dots on the map to show the latitude longitude coordinates of large cities around the world.  This is to help you find your lat-long more easily.   For some visitors using IE this caused some 200 lines to appear in my log file each time some one accessed the page. I have now solved this "feature of IE" making the browser download the tiny square icon once only and then reuse it locally as needed for showing all the cities on the map.

I have also upgraded to Version V2 and have reduced the number of markers for countries where there are now more detailed maps for France, Espana, Portugal, Deutchland, Nederland, Danmark, Belgie Belgique, Italie, Greece, Hungary, Switzerland, Austria, Sverige, Norge, Suomi Finland, Polska, Serbia Montenegro and Brazil.   Only the USA, UK, Japan and Hong Kong previously had detailed maps.  The number of markers is still rather large however and slows down the initial loading.  In the case of Firefox you may get a time out "Warning-Unresponsive Script" message.  Don't worry it is still working OK, just click continue.  This problem should disappear in the future when more map data is added and the lat/long icons for the cities are no longer needed.  Another minor matter is the clickable city/town markers themselves.  In version V1, the markers were clickable.  In V2 the marker is in fact a single pixel with a large clickable square shadow.  The top left corner of the square shadow is not clickable - I have not resolved this.

On 6th June 2006, I added optional satellite dish pointing angles - azimuth, elevation and feed rotation polarisation angles.  These are based on the latitude and longitude of your site location and the orbit position longitude of the geostationary satellite selected which is above the equator.  Not all the bugs may be out of this yet.  If you see problems please tell me.  You need your latitude longitude location to about 0.1 degree accuracy for the satellite azimuth and elevation angle calculator.  Accuracy is particularly important if you are near the equator and almost under the satellite.  The polarization angle appears rotate rapidly as you move from one location to another in the sub-satellite area.

The Google satellite map database already includes some more detailed GPS type mapping information such as town, road and street maps for the US, UK, Ireland and Japan.  In these cases you can use the detailed road and street maps to home in on your latitude and longitude.   Here is a page if you want to see the satellite view of the ground at a latitude and longitude that you already know.

If the page is not working, hopefully I will have fixed it in a minute or so. Every time I upload a new version I check it works OK or go back to the previous version. This happens several times a day. If you have a GPS receiver I would be quite interested to know how close your GPS indicated location is to that shown here. Many GPS receivers may be set to give UK OSGB grid output format.   Or, go here: to find the OSGB map reference for a particular place on the ground; this works only for places in and around the UK.

Read visitor reviews of this page.  You are welcome to please write your own review and send it to me at eric@satsig.net   Your digital camera photo images also welcome.

Page created 25th November 2005, amended 6th June 06 with added dish pointing angles.   18th May 06, with revised center.x converted to center.lng(), 28th April incorporating Google Maps API Version 2 Javascript upgrade and 2 May 2006 with a modification to cause the marker dot to be centered on the satellite map for both IE and Firefox. This dot should start off at twenty degrees latitude (north of the equator) and zero longitude i.e. to south of Greenwich and thus on the Greenwich meridian and follow the mouse clicks to mark the point that corresponds to the displayed values of latitude and longitude. Amended 14th Aug 2007 to add geocoding and allow you to input your town or city name.   October 2007: Deleted some cities in Afghanistan, Pakistan, India and Burma Myanmar as they are now in the main database.  Feedback please to me, Eric Johnston eric@satsig.net Thanks...

In Jan 2007 I removed city / town markers for Cairo, Egypt, Accra, Ghana Abidjan, Ivory Coast, Monrovia, Liberia and Lagos, Nigeria as these towns have now been added to the map database together with many more towns and roads in these countries.  Each one I remove should slightly speed up the initial loading. As of 15th June 2007, the number of lat/long marker icons on the map has dropped to 97, following the deletion of cities and towns in Thailand, Turkey, Ukraine and Romania.

7 Feb 2008: Several icons for towns in Mexico, Panama, Guatemala and Colombia removed (e.g. Medellin, Bogata and Cali).
10 Apr 2008: Two towns added in Nepal: Pokhara and Bhanjyang

24 April 2008 Default location for geocoder set to Gold Bar Road and marker added for Gold Bar Mill, Eureka, Nevada

7 May 2008: Geocoder starting location is now Bassein, near Yangon in Burma, Myanmar, where there has been recent flooding due to a cyclone.

5 June 2008:  Significant html code changes to transition to HTML 4.01 Transitional and the validate the code.

24 Nov 2008: Sensor parameter set to false as this web page is not associated with a GPS sensor device.

5 Feb 2010:   Added the feature to switch on or off the blue azimuth dish pointing direction line. This is of value when used with an enlarged scale as you can see how the dish might be oriented relative to the walls of your house or relative to nearby buildings.

9 Aug 2010: Added optional extra decimal places for the lat long coordinates display.

25 January 2011: The Google Maps API javascript software which makes this page work has been upgraded to V3. The last of my manually included city/town markers have been removed. Domodedovo airport, Moscow set at the default geolocation default.

12 Sept 2012: Orbit position (31 west) added for Hylas 2 satellite.  Azimuth direction line default set to ON.

10 Dec 2012: A Google maps API key has been added so that the number of impressions of this page may be counted, to verify comply with the daily limit of 25000 free hits.

Click here if you want latitude - longitude finder for dish pointing in Iraq  Lebanon dish pointing and lat-long finder map

6 May 2014: Prevented the display of longitudes in excess of 180 deg.

15 April 2016: Link to the explanation of GMT changed to a good educational text on Wikipedia.

27 March 2018: Earth's magnetic field model updated. True bearings and magnetic compass declination included in output.

In June 2018 Google started charging me for the use of maps as shown on this page. Even with their free quota I am exceeding it and have had bills of several hundred $ per month, which is too much.

To try and reduce demand, this page now has usage quotas:  Users per 100 seconds. Requests per user per 100 seconds and total Requests per day.

7 Dec 2018: I have removed a Geocoding function (where you type in the name of a wanted place) which worked till 4th Dec 2018.  I have removed since it was costing me as much as the map requests and it was a luxury for you.

18 Feb 2019: This page costs me money to provide and therefore has a limited daily quota usage. When it is using Google maps API the quota is reset at 8am GMT. In the hours prior to this the daily usage allowance may be exceeded and the map will then stop working. I am working to get an alternative using Mapbox.

4 March 2020: I have updated the list of satellites in geostationary orbit as of 12 Feb 2024.


Disclaimer and Safety Warning:

The results of this page may be in error and are not intended for the navigation of aircraft, ship navigation or other vehicle purposes.  Use is entirely at your own risk.  Apply common sense and watch where you are going and don't believe every number that comes out of a computer system!.

All pages on this satsig.net web site are Copyright Satellite Signals Limited (c) 2005 All rights reserved.

List of satellites updated 17 Dec 2018.  Updated 24 Feb 2023, 28 July 2023, 12 Feb 2024.