GeoPy is a Python library that makes geographical calculations easier for the users. In this article, we will see how to calculate the distance between 2 points on the earth in two ways.
How to Install GeoPy ?
pip install geopy
Geodesic Distance:
It is the length of the shortest path between 2 points on any surface. In our case, the surface is the earth. Below program illustrates how to calculate geodesic distance from latitude-longitude data.
# Importing the geodesic module from the library from geopy.distance import geodesic # Loading the lat-long data for Kolkata & Delhi kolkata = ( 22.5726 , 88.3639 ) delhi = ( 28.7041 , 77.1025 ) # Print the distance calculated in km print (geodesic(kolkata, delhi).km) |
Output:
1318.13891581683
Great Circle Distance:
It is the length of the shortest path between 2 points on a sphere. In this case, the earth is assumed to be a perfect sphere. Below program illustrates how to calculate great-circle distance from latitude-longitude data.
# Importing the great_circle module from the library from geopy.distance import great_circle # Loading the lat-long data for Kolkata & Delhi kolkata = ( 22.5726 , 88.3639 ) delhi = ( 28.7041 , 77.1025 ) # Print the distance calculated in km print (great_circle(kolkata, delhi).km) |
Output:
1317.7554645657162
Reference: https://geopy.readthedocs.io/en/stable/