While working on a ATH (armchair treasure hunt) I found a GREAT tool for figuring out distances at a certain compass heading. Before this, I had been doing a multiple step process with Google Maps:

1. I put a point on Google Earth and opened the ruler tool, which lets you draw a line and shows you the distance and heading. I dragged the end point of the line and the clicked at the distance and heading I wanted from the original point.

2. Then in order to get the coordinates of that end point, I added a placemark and moved it to as close to the end of my line as possible, then read the coordinates.

This was very, very time consuming. I also discovered it isn’t totally accurate because Google Earth doesn’t account for the curve of the planet. In other words, 90 degrees from one point to another should be exactly the same as 270 going back, but it isn’t. It’s off by about 2 degrees.

Then I found this great tool:
Compass Projection Tool

(Well, actually the tool I used, I can’t find again! But this one does the same thing. Type in the coordinates, heading, and distance, and voilà! It shows you the result on the map.

Must easier than doing it the manual way of dragging a line and tweaking until I got the right heading.