Next message: Bill: "Re: Simple celestial navigation in 1897"
D Walden,
Nice analysis running through those sights in the old navigation workbook. I
did something similar for a few other dates. Did you discover that the data
for many dates are calculated twice? You can see that John Layton and his
wife Elizabeth each worked the numbers on those dates. Also, if you would like
to estimate dip, the deck of the Charles W Morgan is about ten feet above the
waterline, so height of eye should be about 15 feet.
So in 1896, you take a morning or afternoon time sight and shoot the Sun at
noon. The ship's position is fixed in as little as ten minutes with simple
calculation. That's how it was done for decades on ships at sea even as late
the 1940s. With all the talk recently on Sumner's method, I think it's worth
remembering that Sumner's lines were considered a somewhat exotic technique,
one that might never be used in months at sea. Celestial lines of position
didn't catch on universally until almost a century after Sumner published. And
why that was the case is still a fascinating question...
On formatting, you wrote:
"Sorry for the garbled tables. I didn't realize the list sever dropped
"extra" spaces!"
Your original message came through fine in e-mail, but the list archives
(and some mail readers) strip out formatting.
-FER
42.0N 87.7W, or 41.4N 72.1W.
www.HistoricalAtlas.com/lunars
