At planiglobe can can add your own places or locations to a map. Open the "add places to a map" dialog left to the main map. Here a place or location would be a site of known co-ordinate. The co-ordinate defines the position of the place on the earth's surface and here at planiglobe online mapping this position is given as values of geographical longitude (X-value) and geographical latitude (Y-value), the most popular format for co-ordinates.

planiglobe uses decimal degree values for co-ordinates. What would that mean? In contrast to the classical notation of degree, minutes and seconds for longitude or latitude value (such as " 23° 32' 18'' E " for instance), minutes and seconds are given as fractions of degrees. Converting is very simple: divide the minutes by 60 and the seconds by 3600 and add both results to the degree value. Our decidrome at the bottom of the "add places to a map" dialog also does the conversion for you.

By this way you come up with one single number. With our example the number would be "23.538". If it was a western longitude (" 23° 32' 18'' W") the number would be "-23.538" because datum longitude is Greenwich, UK, and longitudes west of Greenwich are given a negative sign to indicate that. The same principle applies for latitudes. Here positions south of the equator get the negative sign.

Where would you get information about co-ordinates of a place? You could look it up in an atlas, you could get it from a map, or you use a GPS receiver to determine the longitude and latitude values of places.

You could as well have co-ordinates on file on your computer, downloaded from a GPS receiver or from the internet.

Once you got the co-ordinate(s) you simply fill in the form by typing or via "copy-and-paste" from your computer file. Of course you can add a label to your co-ordinate which prints on the map. If you got latitude/longitude-pairs (Y,X) make use of the " swap x/y " button below the text field.

Hit the submit button and the places get plotted on the map. The area shown by the map is automatically set so that your places all show up. After this inital map you may pan and zoom, your places will stay on the map.