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    Re: Early lunars
    From: George Huxtable
    Date: 2010 Mar 24, 09:22 -0000

    Thanks to Robin Stuart for sensible comments about Columbus' supposed
    longitude determinations from eclipses, and also for his pointer to Keith
    Pickering's intelligent words on the topic, in-
    http://www.columbusnavigation.com/longi.shtml ,
    in which he puts up a convincing argument that Columbus' longitudes were
    simply fraudulent.
    
    Keith Pickering has written on other aspects of Columbus' "navigation", to
    be found from his main webpage at-
    http://www.columbusnavigation.com/index.shtml
    
    He has also produced, elsewhere, other well-informed argument about the
    question of whether Ptolemy's famous star-catalogue was simply stolen by
    him from Hipparchos, and adjusted.
    
    I rather like Pickering's style of reasoning, and his publications make
    good reading, whether or not you agree with every word..
    
    George.
    
    contact George Huxtable, at  george@hux.me.uk
    or at +44 1865 820222 (from UK, 01865 820222)
    or at 1 Sandy Lane, Southmoor, Abingdon, Oxon OX13 5HX, UK.
    ----- Original Message -----
    From: "Robin Stuart" 
    To: 
    Sent: Wednesday, March 24, 2010 12:03 AM
    Subject: [NavList] Re: Early lunars
    
    
    George,
    
             The phrase "when the moon had just returned to its light" could
    either mean the end of totality which would be signaled by the first hint
    of white light returning to the Moon's disk as it begins to exit the umbra
    or it could mean the end of the partial phase when the last vestiges of the
    dark umbra disappear from the disk. For a number of reasons, including
    relative ease of naked eye observation, I would suspect that it is the
    latter. When you crank the numbers, however, Columbus's report doesn't
    really line up with the events as they actually happened and there are some
    arguments out there that his results were fabricated, see
    The circumstances of the eclipse of 1504 can be found at
    http://eclipse.gsfc.nasa.gov/LEcat5/LE1501-1600.html with a graphical
    summary at
    http://eclipse.gsfc.nasa.gov/5MCLEmap/1501-1600/LE1504-03-01T.gif
    (attached). Assuming a position for Santa Gloria of 18 26'45" N, 77 12' 30"
    W, sunset would be at 23h 15m UT.
    (http://www.srrb.noaa.gov/highlights/sunrise/sunrise.html)
    
    The key times in the eclipse are
    
    Partial phase begins: 23h 2m TD
    Totality begins: 0h 21m TD
    Totality ends: 1h 9m TD
    Partial phase ends: 2h 28m TD
    
    The difference between UT and TD at the time was TD - UT = 191s and we can
    ignore for the present purposes.
    
    None of these is a very convincing match to being "two hours and a half
    after sunset".  Totality and the partial phase ended 1h 54m and 3h 13m
    after sunset respectively. Columbus would have had to have been at
    longitude 88 W (in the Yucatan) to see the partial phase end "two hours and
    a half after sunset". Add another hour or so west for possible
    misinterpretation of the quoted time in the almanac and you beginning to
    get to his 7h15m west of Cadiz (i.e. 115 W). Maybe he backed out the
    eclipse observation to put himself where he wanted to be.
    
    I have tried to make sense of the figure of the contemporary eclipse tables
    attached to your posting. I can claim no expertise in this however. The
    line above the month appears to gives the Julian date (day, hour, minutes)
    of mid-eclipse with 0h being at local noon for some European location. By
    comparing with modern predictions, I would guess that the last line is half
    the duration (hours, minutes) from start to end of the partial phase of the
    eclipse. This is the time you need to subtract/add to the time of
    mid-eclipse to get the start/end of the partial phase. If this was standard
    practice then Columbus's description, "when the moon had just returned to
    its light", probably referred to the end of the partial phase.
    
    The scanned text you attach states "and as the beginning thereof was before
    the sun set" . The beginning of the partial phase would have occurred just
    prior to sunset from Jamaica but long before sunset from 7h15m west of
    Cadiz. In fact from that location he would not have seen a total eclipse at
    all, just the final stages of the partial phase. This conclusion does not
    depend on Columbus's erroneous estimate of the diameter of the Earth.
    
    Robin Stuart
    
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