NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Re: Averaging
From: Fred Hebard
Date: 2004 Oct 21, 21:05 -0400
From: Fred Hebard
Date: 2004 Oct 21, 21:05 -0400
On Oct 21, 2004, at 8:52 PM, Herbert Prinz wrote: > Why in the world would anybody want to do 3 least square fits in the > wrong place when 1 in the right place is enough? If someone could > explain this to me, I will keep quiet. This must be an idea that > originated from long winter evenings at the fireplace, not from a real > world nav-station. It could be that it takes but a few button pushes in a spreadsheet to fit a straight line, whereas fitting another type of equation by least squares is tough for people: there's no recipe > > >> Standard procedure for plotting a line of position >> using the St. Hilaire method calls for plotting a >> straight line, when we know that what we "should" be >> plotting is the arc of a great circle. Still, the >> straight line is useful. >> In case it wasn't clear, Herbert's response to my previous post on this matter invalidated what I said.