Mastering Matplotlib 2.x

How to draw great circles

Next, we will take a look at the great circle method. Here, we can actually draw great circles that explicitly connect two points using the shortest distance. We will draw a horizontal and vertical lines between different points:

# The shortest distance: the great circlem = Basemap(width=1.2e7,height=9e6,projection='lcc', lat_1=45.,lat_2=55,lat_0=49.5,lon_0=8.7)setup_map(m)m.drawgreatcircle(-10,45,60,45, color='g', lw=3, linestyle='--')m.drawgreatcircle(0,50,10,0, color='b', lw=3, linestyle='--')m.plot(np.linspace(-10,60,20), 45*np.ones(20), 'g-', latlon=True, lw=3)m.plot(np.linspace(0,10,20), np.linspace(50,0,20), 'b-', latlon=True, lw=3)plt.show()

Here, we see the great circle connection between two points is the ...