Saturday, March 3, 2012

"Across" the Kaaba

Where ever on this earth, Muslims face the Kaaba when we pray during salah. This direction is called the qibla. Basically, it's the direction in which a bird would start flying in order to get to the Kaaba by the shortest possible way.

This is interesting, because of the Earth's rounded shape, if you take a straight line from the Kaaba, through the center of the Earth, towards the surface across it, from here, the bird can fly in any direction and the distance to the Kaaba are all the same. Which means, here, any direction is the qibla! :) Now the shape of the Earth is not best represented by a perfect sphere, but an ellipsoid instead. But then still, from this place, the bird can choose 2 opposite directions that lead to the Kaaba with the same (shortest) distance. :D I wonder where that is!

So, the location of the Kaaba is at 21°25′21.15″N 39°49′34.1″E. Based on the image below from Wikipedia describing the latitude and longitude of the Earth


(and a little knowledge on how to convert the degrees-minutes-seconds coordinates to decimal degrees), we can infer that the location of this peculiar place is at -21.42254167, -140.1738611. Let's look it up on Google Maps! And... *drum roll


it's in the middle of nowhere (the South Pacific Ocean to be precise). Well...