Re: COMPASS ROSE
Subject: Re: COMPASS ROSE
From: nigel_gardner (Nigel_Gardner@XXX.XXX)
Date: Sat Mar 24 2001 - 07:45:29 EST
Certainly for general directions just saying 'head SSE' is often all that
is needed for say pilotage, I used to sail a boat some years ago that had a
rather splendid compass with pelorus, alidade and other fancy gizmos,
during the day one had a choice of degrees or points to choose from but at
night only the points were illuminated, so if some precise courses were
required then the form was to take the courses off the chart in degrees and
then convert them by means of Mr Norie's magnificent frontispiece to
points.
Regarding "N 45 E", "S 20 W", when I used to 'astro' for a living we used
to calculate our azimuths in term of the elevated pole and whether the body
was East or West of the local meridian. Thus an early morning sun shot in
Summer off Australia might have as Z, S123E, this was just as easy to plot
as 360 notation and meant one less arithmetical step to go wrong.
NG
