NavList:

John H, you wrote:
"Perhaps the definition of a conscientious navigator is one who would take a lunar when the opportunity arose?"

Well, you need more than that, right? After all, lunars almost completely disappeared from practical navigation by 1850 on American vessels and as much as twenty years earlier on British vessels. The tools, the tables, the almanac data were all available right through the first years of the 20th century, so does that then mean that there were no conscientious navigators AT ALL for decades??! Ha. :-) Clearly not. Lunars were used when they provided navigationally useful information. That's vague almost to the point of being a tautology, but that's the way it was.

And you wrote:
"I'm trying to track some pre-1500 material on lunars."

They probably weren't literally lunars. This is a real historical expression in the history of navigation. "Lunars" refers *specifically* to shooting lunar distances for Greenwich Time. Of course there are a variety of other ways to get longitude using the Moon: longitude by lunar eclipses, by lunar culminations (land observatories), by lunar altitudes, but you may want to be careful not to call these "lunars". It's only semantics, of course.

-FER

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