rvincenty¶ ↑

This is a ruby implementation of the Vincenty’s formulae to calculate the distance between two points on earth. The formula assumes that the figure of the Earth is an oblate spheroid and is therefore much accurate than other methods which assume a spherical Earth.

The code was heavily inspired by Chris Venues Javascript implementation and explanations:

Vincenty formula for distance between two Latitude/Longitude points

www.movable-type.co.uk/scripts/latlong-vincenty.html

require 'rvincenty'

point_a = 45.965, 63.305    # Baikonur Cosmodrome
point_b = 28.585, -80.651   # John F. Kennedy Space Center

distance = RVincenty.distance(point_a, point_b)

puts "Distance between %s and %s is %f km" % [point_a.inspect, point_b.inspect, distance / 1000]

• Fork the project.

• Make your feature addition or bug fix.

• Add tests for it. This is important so I don’t break it in a future version unintentionally.

• Commit, do not mess with rakefile, version, or history. (if you want to have your own version, that is fine but bump version in a commit by itself I can ignore when I pull)

• Send me a pull request. Bonus points for topic branches.

Copyright © 2009 Reto Schüttel. See LICENSE for details.