Latitude and longitude

        Biggie congrats to the Chinese Space Agency, that successfully landed Chang'e 3 and deployed the Yutu rover at 44.1143°N, 19.5149°W on the Moon. Here's a permalink to the landing site in the ACT-REACT LRO lunar map.

        Richard Hoagland was torn from his nice warm bed to comment on this event with C2C host John B. Wells last night. He went straight for the least useful aspect of it -- the numerology.

Long, not Lat, Richard dear
        For at least 15 years Hoagland has been telling us (screaming, it seems like) that the 19.5° latitude is extra special. Magic. Ritual. Hyperdimensional. In support of this, he has cited Jupiter's red spot, Olympus Mons, Neptune's dark spot and Mauna Kea. All of which are NOT at 19.5°, but that's perhaps a minor detail. Now suddenly it's the 19.5° longitude that's magic/ritual/hyperdimensional, as Hoagland proclaims that the Chinese know all about the ritual and observed it correctly. Richard Hoagland is confused, you might say. If you were less charitable you might say Hoagland is crazy.

The ETs know, y'know
        It got worse. He went sailing off into a total fantasy about how this was China's message to the extraterrestrial intelligences. Something along the lines of "Look you guys, we're the ones to talk to as representatives of Planet Earth. See how LEET we are -- the Americans are crap, basically"

        I would have collapsed laughing if I hadn't already been collapsed in bed at the next bit. He said the choice of 19.5° longitude would have sealed the deal. The ET high command would be thinking "Hmmm, these Chinese really understand. The magic 19.5, WOW!!" This would require that a) The ETs chose exactly the same point on the Moon to designate as the 0° longitude, b) They count in decimals, and c) They also divide a circle into 360 degrees.

        Richard Hoagland is very confused. My message to the Chinese: WELL DONE. To Coast-to-Coast: GET SOMEONE WHO KNOWS WHAT HE'S TALKING ABOUT, FOR GOD'S SAKE.

Some latitude for error?

Richard Hoagland has stated many, many times that the latitude 19.5° N or S has special properties. It is the latitude of three of the vertices of a tetrahedron inscribed in a sphere when the fourth vertex is placed at one of the poles, and according to Hoagland "hyperdimensional energy" is manifest at these latitudes.

Hoagland is also quite addicted to stating that features are at that latitude when in fact they are not. The Great Red Spot of Jupiter and Olympus Mons on Mars are two examples. On Earth, there is but one genuine example — the massive volcano Mauna Loa, exactly at 19.5° N.

Last night (25/26 January 2010) on Coast To Coast AM Richard Hoagland stated that Port-au-Prince, site of the recent devastating earthquake, is at 19.5 degrees. In actual fact the exact coordinates of the epicenter are 18°30'N, 72°38'W. A caller to the show pointed this simple fact out and, after some pause for thought, Hoagland retorted "I was thinking of geodetic latitude — not geographic — the latitudes change because the Earth is not a perfect sphere, it's an oblate spheroid."

Well, OK. That has some superficial logic. The geometry he suggests would obviously assume a perfect sphere, and indeed our planet is not that. George Noory let it slide by, as he always does.

Here, however, are the problems with that statement.

- Latitudes as commonly cited are geodetic. The other form of latitude is geocentric.
- A geocentric latitude is always less than its geodetic equivalent.

Here's the deal. A geocentric latitude is based on the imaginary radial line connecting a point on the Earth's surface to the exact center of the Earth. A geodetic latitude is based on a pseudo-radial line which is the extension of the local vertical. This image (taken from this wikipedia article) is an exaggerated depiction of a point whose geodetic latitude is 66° and geocentric 60°.







Now, conversion from one to the other is not a simple matter. The difference at this latitude is something like seven minutes of arc. But we can say for sure that neither the geocentric nor geodetic latitude of Port-au-Prince is 19.5°. This was almost certainly a deliberate lie by Hoagland, which he knew he would get away with because of George Noory's ignorance of mathematics.

If it were true, by the way, that 18°30' converts to some "real" 19.5°, Hoagland would lose the one shining example of "hyper-dimensional energy" that he claims. The 18°30' latitude does not pass through Mauna Loa. In fact it misses Hawaii completely. It also misses Popacatapetl. It misses everything that could conceivably validate Hoagland's ridiculous proposition.

Should we allow Hoagland some latitude for error? I say no — he's just a liar.