Calculate the center point of multiple latitude/longitude coordinate pairs

Thanks! Here is a C# version of OP's solutions using degrees. It utilises the System.Device.Location.GeoCoordinate class

    public static GeoCoordinate GetCentralGeoCoordinate(
        IList<GeoCoordinate> geoCoordinates)
    {
        if (geoCoordinates.Count == 1)
        {
            return geoCoordinates.Single();
        }

        double x = 0;
        double y = 0;
        double z = 0;

        foreach (var geoCoordinate in geoCoordinates)
        {
            var latitude = geoCoordinate.Latitude * Math.PI / 180;
            var longitude = geoCoordinate.Longitude * Math.PI / 180;

            x += Math.Cos(latitude) * Math.Cos(longitude);
            y += Math.Cos(latitude) * Math.Sin(longitude);
            z += Math.Sin(latitude);
        }

        var total = geoCoordinates.Count;

        x = x / total;
        y = y / total;
        z = z / total;

        var centralLongitude = Math.Atan2(y, x);
        var centralSquareRoot = Math.Sqrt(x * x + y * y);
        var centralLatitude = Math.Atan2(z, centralSquareRoot);

        return new GeoCoordinate(centralLatitude * 180 / Math.PI, centralLongitude * 180 / Math.PI);
    }

The simple approach of just averaging them has weird edge cases with angles when they wrap from 359' back to 0'.

A much earlier question on SO asked about finding the average of a set of compass angles.

An expansion of the approach recommended there for spherical coordinates would be:

• Convert each lat/long pair into a unit-length 3D vector.
• Sum each of those vectors
• Normalise the resulting vector
• Convert back to spherical coordinates

I found this post very useful so here is the solution in PHP. I've been using this successfully and just wanted to save another dev some time.

/**
 * Get a center latitude,longitude from an array of like geopoints
 *
 * @param array data 2 dimensional array of latitudes and longitudes
 * For Example:
 * $data = array
 * (
 *   0 = > array(45.849382, 76.322333),
 *   1 = > array(45.843543, 75.324143),
 *   2 = > array(45.765744, 76.543223),
 *   3 = > array(45.784234, 74.542335)
 * );
*/
function GetCenterFromDegrees($data)
{
    if (!is_array($data)) return FALSE;

    $num_coords = count($data);

    $X = 0.0;
    $Y = 0.0;
    $Z = 0.0;

    foreach ($data as $coord)
    {
        $lat = $coord[0] * pi() / 180;
        $lon = $coord[1] * pi() / 180;

        $a = cos($lat) * cos($lon);
        $b = cos($lat) * sin($lon);
        $c = sin($lat);

        $X += $a;
        $Y += $b;
        $Z += $c;
    }

    $X /= $num_coords;
    $Y /= $num_coords;
    $Z /= $num_coords;

    $lon = atan2($Y, $X);
    $hyp = sqrt($X * $X + $Y * $Y);
    $lat = atan2($Z, $hyp);

    return array($lat * 180 / pi(), $lon * 180 / pi());
}