If you own your own home, you can get precise latitude and longitude data from the architectural drawings. If you need to find it on the fly, a GPS unit is the way to go, and they’re fairly cheap these days.
Holy cow, dude, my record is a triple post! Ease up on them hammers.
If you haven’t a GPS and can’t beg borrow or steal one, and if you don’t have architectural drawings, just buy a topographic map of your area. They will have lat and long marked to a degree sufficient to get enough accuracy for your purposes (a few hundred yards).
Heck (in Australia at least) even a common or garden street directory has lats and longs.
MapQuest can show a map if you type in a lat and long. If you know exactly where your house is on the map, you can repeatedly type in lat/long combinations to MapQuest until the place where it puts the star on the map corresponds to the actual location of your house. This is slow and painful, but it works - I found my own ICBM coords this way.
The topo map is a better method, but it ain’t free and you’d (GASP!) have to leave the house…
-Ben
You can also call the closest airport.
www.topozone.com will do that. Find your general location by entering city and state, then click on the precise location. It will place a target where you click, and the lat/long of the target is displayed above. It lets you zoom in for precision, and you can get coordinates in UTM, decimal or degree/minute formats.
Any decent CD mapping program will give you your precise latitude and longitude. Street Atlas USA will do this and is usually 40 or so. Older versions will do this also and can be had for as little as 10.
Ah, so boring… I was hoping for the answer they used on “Rough Science” on the Science Channel (originally BBC, I believe)… but unfortunately I can’t remember what they did. I remember that they were able to get latitude and longitude to withing a couple degrees using the north star, some string, a weight, and a radio (for offset from GMT–they built the radio, so it was fair use), but I don’t remember the details…
If you’ve got a significant feature near you (like a city or a dam or a glacier or a post office), you can use this page from the U.S. Geological Survey. For a city, select “populated place” as the feature type from the popup menu.
Oh alright jharmon if you want to do it the hard way, go ahead.
What’s happened to the OP ?!
Map Quest hooked me up!
Thanks to my fellow Dopers I will finally be able to locate that darn moon I’ve heard so much about!!
PeaceOut!!
Princhester, that only details how to find the latitude. That is easy, and why mess with astrolabs when you can use a sextant? Sextants are available for purchase in boating magazines for $5.00. What about the longitude?
Well the OP only asked about latitude