Calculate the center point of multiple latitude/longitude coordinate pairs

Question

Given a set of latitude and longitude points, how can I calculate the latitude and longitude of the center point of that set (aka a point that would center a view on all poi

Answer 1

In Django this is trivial (and actually works, I had issues with a number of the solutions not correctly returning negatives for latitude).

For instance, let's say you are using django-geopostcodes (of which I am the author).

from django.contrib.gis.geos import MultiPoint
from django.contrib.gis.db.models.functions import Distance
from django_geopostcodes.models import Locality

qs = Locality.objects.anything_icontains('New York')
points = [locality.point for locality in qs]
multipoint = MultiPoint(*points)
point = multipoint.centroid

point is a Django Point instance that can then be used to do things such as retrieve all objects that are within 10km of that centre point;

Locality.objects.filter(point__distance_lte=(point, D(km=10)))\
    .annotate(distance=Distance('point', point))\
    .order_by('distance')

Changing this to raw Python is trivial;

from django.contrib.gis.geos import Point, MultiPoint

points = [
    Point((145.137075, -37.639981)),
    Point((144.137075, -39.639981)),
]
multipoint = MultiPoint(*points)
point = multipoint.centroid

Under the hood Django is using GEOS - more details at https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.10/ref/contrib/gis/geos/