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A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
From: Bob Goethe
Date: 2015 Apr 22, 09:15 -0700
>>By 1805 the errors in the lunar distance tables had been significantly reduced. By 1875, they were nearly perfect for navigational use (though lunars were essentially obsolete at sea by that date, there were still a handful of practitioners, and there were definitely lunarians on land, exploring and mapping Africa, for example).<<
Frank, do you have some names of cartographers in Africa who were using sextants and lunars?
The May 1996 edition of the National Geographic Magazine had an article on David Thompson exploring/mapping Canada with a sextant in hand, back in 1795. Some of his maps were still in use up into the 20th century. I had always wondered what-the-heck kind of pocket watch he had...but it now occurs to me he may have used (or perhaps "probably did use") lunars.
Bob
