As we drove around Provence, we kept seeing familiar climates and commenting on how this place looked like Northern California and this other place looked like Michigan, or Utah or someplace else. I started wondering what our latitude was as compared to those places and if that could explain some of this though I didn't think that any of the mapping sites would let me just see a list of places along the same latitude. Sure, I can follow a latitude line in Google Earth or at Mappoint but it is a pain and slow so I did what any geek would do when faced with this problem.
I wrote a website.
While we were still in France, I was playing around with getting GPS coordinates from both MapPoint and Google and while Google was simpler to get started, MapPoint was much more flexible. Once I got home, I took what I learned and created SameLatitude.com which lets you enter a city and it will show you a list of other cities that are at the same latitude as the one you entered. OK, technically it is close to the same latitude and I'm still tuning that part but the results are pretty interesting. For those of you who think the other way, I also have a way to look for cities that have a longitudinal similarity.
Once you've found your cities, you can look at pictures of them from Flickr or look at maps directly in the website.
Give it a try and let me know what you think.
BTW, Cannes is about the same latitude as Rutland, VT, Boise, ID and Guelph, ON. Much futher north than I would have expected.
2 comments:
Very neat idea. I was surprised by several that I saw. Any way to have the map you link to zoom out? I went looking for a couple to see where they were and was pretty mystified. Look for Paris, France - it'll point you to Columbus, ND. Go the map for columbus, ND - it's pretty amusing.
Ed Evans
Awesome, Chris!!! I sent the link to e-v-e-r-y-o-n-e on my mailing list! Personally... I can't imagine that Paris, France has ANY relation to North Dakota!
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