C# find all Latitude and Longitude within a mile

Question

Given a lat and long value, is there any way of finding all lat and longs that are within a specified distance? I have a db table of lat and long values which are locations of let's say street lamps, given a lat long pair how could I find all those that are within a particular distance?

I guess drawing a circle from the starting point and finding all lat and longs contained would be the best way however, I don't have the skills to do this. I am ac# developer by trade but need a few pointers in the whole geocoding world.

Answer 1

You could use the Haversine Formula (see @tdammers answer) to calculate a distance between each point (Lat, Long) in your table and the given point. You will have to iterate over the entire collection in order to evaluate each point individually.

Or, if you are using SQL Server 2008, then geospatial support is built-in. Each record would store the location as a geography type (possibly in addition to two discrete columns to hold Latitude and Longitude, if it's easier to have those values broken out), and then you can construct a simple SQL query:

DECLARE @Point geography = 'POINT(-83.12345 45.12345)' -- Note: Long Lat ordering required when using WKT

SELECT * 
FROM tblStreetLamps
WHERE location.STDistance(@point) < 1 * 1609.344  -- Note: 1 mile converted to meters

Another similar possibility is to bring the SQL Spatial types into your .NET application. The redistributable is found here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=CEB4346F-657F-4D28-83F5-AAE0C5C83D52 (under Microsoft® System CLR Types for SQL Server® 2008 R2).

Then, the querying can be done via LINQ. Note: This saves you from implementing the Haversine by yourself, otherwise the process of querying would be the same.

var yourLocation = SqlGeography.Point(Latitude, Longitude, 4326);

var query = from fac in FacilityList
            let distance = SqlGeography
                          .Point(fac.Lat, fac.Lon, 4326)
                          .STDistance(yourLocation)
                          .Value
            where distance < 1 * 1609.344
            orderby distance
            select fac;

return query.Distinct().ToList();

Answer 2

The haversine formula gives you the distance (in meters; converting to miles is trivial) between two lat/lon points. From there, you can probably find the reverse...

Answer 3

I'm a little late for answering this, but I came up with a trick years ago to do essentially the same for satellite fields of view.

There are two points on earth where you exactly know the latitude and longitude of every point a given distance from your location. Those points are the North and South poles. So let's put the point you want at North pole. One nautical mile away is the circle of longitudes with latitude 90 degrees minus 1 minute, or 90 – 1/60 degrees = 89.9833 degrees North latitude, since 1 minute of arc = 1 nautical mile.

Now that you have the locus of longitudes one mile from the pole with latitude 89.9833, you essentially rotate the earth until the lat/long you want is where the pole used to be. This process is called “The Rotation of the Map Graticules”. The math for this is straight forward, once you've thought about the equations awhile. I have them buried somewhere, so I can't get to the code easily, however the process, with the equations is in John Snyder's book “Map Projections: A Working Manual”. You can get the pdf free at http://pubs.usgs.gov/pp/1395/report.pdf . The explanation is on pages 29 – 32.

Chuck Gantz

Answer 4

some time ago I was solving a problem how to get POIs along the road. I made use of quadtree, that means dividing the whole area into cells and subcells recursively. Each POI belongs to only one cell. Having these cells you can easily do high level calculation on cell level and after that search only cells with intersection. It's more game development technique but can be used here as well. Here is something about it on Wiki:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadtree