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Here's my model:

class ExchangeArea(models.Model):
    """
    An Exchange Service Area, calculated from a phone exchange and surrounding census tracts. 
    """
    coordinates = models.PointField(null=True, geography=True)
    geom = models.MultiPolygonField(null=True, geography=True) 
    objects = models.GeoManager()
    adopts = AdoptionManager()

    def __unicode__(self):        
        return '(%f, %f)' % (self.coordinates.coords[1], self.coordinates.coords[0])

And here's my ipython terminal output:

for e in ExchangeArea.objects.distance(ea.coordinates)[:10]: print e.distance, e.coordinates.wkt

0.0 m POINT (-121.4749999999999801 36.5399999999999991)                  
34.3149213171 m POINT (-87.4350000000000023 32.2049999999999983)  
34.1483824654 m POINT (-87.6800000000000068 31.6400000000000006)          
1.30461680198 m POINT (-122.4000000000000057 37.4600000000000009)         
27.2054594705 m POINT (-94.2750000000000057 35.9950000000000045)          
34.2874590776 m POINT (-87.7500000000000000 30.3550000000000004)         
29.441773469 m POINT (-92.1550000000000011 33.8650000000000020)          
5.51086451056 m POINT (-116.1352147188304826 35.1775313564249501)        
2.11899150541 m POINT (-119.6700000000000017 37.6499999999999986)        
27.6825400749 m POINT (-93.7950000000000017 36.1649999999999991)

Using this code as a reference, the first non-zero distance should be:

3151063.676 m

Update

So using south I've worked around this issue, ideally retaining the same level of accuracy (with reduced speed) by switching back to a normal geometry field (removing geography=true from my model) and using spheroid=True on my distance queries. They are now in a more sensible order of magnitude and still treat the earth as an spheroid (which is why I was using geography=True in the first place). Still would like to know what the deal with geography fields is. Leaving this open until someone can explain.

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Haven't used geodjango but I'm wondering if the geography=true is just a notice to it to tell it the data is stored in geography format. Are your geometries in postgis stored as geography or geometry?

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  • It does save it in geography format. That was the idea. My understanding was that would automatically ensure all distance calculations would treat the earth as a spheroid. However I never got that to work (as I detailed in the Update). It appears it gives me the angular distances rather than a distance in meters.
    – Griffith Rees
    Sep 7, 2011 at 0:50
  • So: at the moment the solution is to store it as geometry rather than geography, and geodjango can do the spheroid calculation for me, which I assume just calls the corresponding postgis function.
    – Griffith Rees
    Sep 7, 2011 at 0:51

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