Jaernian Units of Mesurement
The priests of the God of Knowledge and Scientific Advancement, Tarus, had long ago created a system for measuring distances and positions on the surface of Jaern. This system relies on the relative position of the stars, Jaern’s two moons, and Onra in the sky at any given moment. They used the rare occurrences of different eclipses and other stellar phenomena to calibrate this system and make their initial measurements.
The Temple of Tarus, called an Archive, in the city of Karfelon (which no longer exists) was used as the base position of this system. Any point on the planet is a fixed distance from the north pole to the south pole of Jaern. This distance was set arbitrarily as 10,000 units of Polus, related to the arc-length formed by an increment of the polar angle (measuring latitude) in spherical coordinates (0 Polus being the North Pole and 10,000 Polus being the South Pole). At the equator of Jaern, another unit of measurement called an Ekva measures the azimuthal angle (measuring longitude), arbitrarily set at 10,000 Ekva for a full revolution (with Karfelon located at 0 or 10,000 Ekva). Thus, geographical coordinates of Polus by Ekva (similar to latitude by longitude) can determine the coordinates of any location on Jaern. While the angle covered by an Ekva is constant, the physical arc-length of an Ekva on the surface of Jaern grows shorter the farther away from the equator one travels, becoming zero at the poles.
Further, some Jaernians use an antiquated unit of measuring distance called a Met (not to be confused with “meters”), which is equal to one-third of a Polus (or one-third of an Ekva at the equator), and about equal to 2,000 feet. A related unit is the Millomet, equal to one million Mets, which is used for astronomical distances.