NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Re: Classification of the methods for clearing the Lunar Distances
From: Bruce Stark
Date: 2003 Apr 10, 13:17 EDT
From: Bruce Stark
Date: 2003 Apr 10, 13:17 EDT
Fred, Never you mind what that writer in your 1962 Bowditch said about haversines. Haversines were used by navigators before that fellow's grandfather was born. It's just that the weren't called "haversines." They were called things like "logarithms of the horary angle," "log sine square . . .," etc. They saved two steps in working a time sight. Not every set of navigation tables had them. As to Gaussian addition and subtraction logs, I expect you mean the first proposal for their use in navigation came in the twentieth century. That may be true. But they were used by mathematicians and astronomers long before that, as someone pointed out when we were discussing them on the List a while back. It's not concern about copyrights that keeps me from putting on the List things the Navigation Foundation has published. It's appreciation. I spent way too many years howling in the wilderness not to appreciate being given a chance to say something in print. The Newsletter also published Robert Eno's "Field assessment" of the Tables, which gave them credibility in the navigation community. If Ernest Brown and Capt. Carraway hadn't been there keeping the Foundation alive, you'd never have heard about the Tables. But having Herbert Prinz call the Tables "highly original" encouraged me to try to remember how they came about, and why they turned out the way they did. I made a start yesterday, but probably won't get around to finishing, and posting to the List, until next week. Bruce