Distance Calculator

When you select a city or click down on the mouse, it sets sets either the Source or the Target (depending on which is selected). The distance, heading and noon are then set.
- The distance and heading are computed as though the Earth were a perfect sphere.
  Since it is actually a bit lumpy, they may be slightly off.
- The "Noon" field shows the different in hours between a solar noon (e.g. sun straight up) in each place.
The Path will cause the animation to either show the shortest flight path from Source to Target, or will show all the points on the globe that are the same distance from the Source.
- It is just too painful to get it to work on NN, so for now it only really works on IE.
The latitude / longitude / country information is from lists on the web,
so I won't vouch for it.
- For a more complete listing of information for cities, see How Far is It?
So where does this come from? Years ago I did the Map control panel on the Mac. As an exercise, I decided to try to duplicate the functionality on the web, using JavaScript. It only took a fraction of the programming time to get the basic functionality: I was able to develop a working version on a flight to Hong Kong.

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