As you know, the earth is not a perfect sphere. It's sort of pumpkin shaped. This makes the mathematics for navigation a little more complicated. Especially for large distances. But it effects short distances, too. In a previous career, these distances were important. If you used spherical geometry to calculate the number of feet between two points that were 15 or 20 miles apart, you'd get errors on the order of a few hundred feet. I knew how to correct for this. I was also the proud owner of a Texas Instruments SR-52 programmable calculator. (Again, I'm dating myself.) I decided to write a program for my trusty SR-52 that would take the drudgery out of making the corrections. It took me a while, first creating the equations, then squeezing the code into the 224 steps. My program was accurate to within a dozen feet or so over a 20 mile distance, perfectly acceptable. I just did it for fun. It had been four years since I'd worked as a programmer while I was in college.
I told you that story so I could present the following with a little credibility.
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