With the advent of the Birds Australia Alas, GPS receivers have become
as important a piece of birding equipment as binoculars and field
guides. Well, almost, anyway. Probably I am not the only person who
finds it a pain to identify accurately my latitude and longitude from
the AUSLIG 1:100,000 maps, the type I usually use, when I do not have my
GPS receiver with me. Having used grid references on these maps (and the
1:63,360s before them) for most of my life I find the switch to lat/long
a bit of a pain. (Yes, I have and sometimes use the Excel spreadsheet
provided by AUSLIG for for converting between grid refs and lat/long,
but it is all a bit tedious.)
One thing intrugues me. With grid references we conventionally cite the
easting followed by the northing. There is no choice in the matter. But
with latitude/longitude we conventionally do it the other way round: nn
degrees/minutes/second South (latitude) followed by nn
degrees/minutes/seconds East (longitude). The GPS receivers' readouts
also deal with them this way.
Does anyone know how we came to have these differing sequences?
David McDonald
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David McDonald
PO Box 1355, Woden ACT 2606, Australia
Tel: +61 2 6231 8904 (h); +61 2 6249 5618 (w)
Fax: +61 2 6249 0740
E-mail:
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