Inspired by a comment by hupakee@lemmy.world under SurrealPartisan’s recent post in this community

The longest straight line over land is this great circle (see NeatNit’s comment here if the link isn’t working for you, sorry about that). But, of course, most great circles don’t look very straight on most maps. To correct for this, I (very roughly) got the northernmost point of the great circle and put that value into G.Projector to get an oblique equirectangular projection that treats the great circle as if it were the equator on a regular map

The base map is Wikimedia Commons’ equirectangular projection map

  • NeatNit@discuss.tchncs.de
    4·
    16 days ago

    Your great circle link doesn’t work for me. It goes to a page with the title “Fix location 5�2′51.59″N 9�7′23.26″W” and the red error message “No locations match 5�2’51.59"N 9�7’23.26"W”. I think that site is quite broken, which isn’t too surprising considering it doesn’t even support HTTPS.

    Edit: this is apparently Lemmy breaking links. I reported it: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/6613

    • NeatNit@discuss.tchncs.de
      2·
      16 days ago

      Managed to work it out, here’s the fixed link: www.gcmap.com/mapui?P=5%B02%2751.59%22N+9%B07%2723.26%22W-28%B017%277.68%22N+121%B038%2717.31%22E&MS=wls&DU=mi

      Apparently Lemmy is screwing something up with the link. If you paste it into a comment, it gets modified.

      Edit: okay, what the hell.

      The query string starts with: P=5%B02%27

      But this gets converted to: http://example.com/?P=5%EF%BF%BD2%27

      • Skua@kbin.earthOP
        2·
        16 days ago

        Ahh, if it’s an issue with lemmy then that would explain why it’s working for me. I’ll add that as an alternative link in the post body

    • Skua@kbin.earthOP
      1·
      16 days ago

      Ahh, sorry about that! I took the link from the reference on the wikipedia page where I found it. The description is:

      The longest continuous straight-line (great circle) path over land is 13,588 km (8,443 mi) long and spans between the West African coast near Greenville, Liberia (5°2′51.59″N 9°7′23.26″W) and a peninsula about 100 km (60 mi) northeast of Wenzhou, China (28°17′7.68″N 121°38′17.31″E), passing over the Suez Canal.