Sorting MySQL query by Latitude/Longitude

Question

Every user in my database has their latitude and longitude stored in two fields (lat, lon)

The format of each field is:

lon | -1.403976 
lat | 53.428         


        

Answer 1

Using just SELECT * FROM Table WHERE lat between $minlat and $maxlat will not be accurate enough.

The correct way to query distance is using the coordinates in radians.

Here is a handy reference - http://janmatuschek.de/LatitudeLongitudeBoundingCoordinates

For example:

And if you want to do the order by and show the distance:

Edited for @Blazemonger and the avoidance of doubt :) If you want to work in degrees instead of radians:

You could easily wrap this up into a class that accepted Radians or Degrees from the information provided above.