NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Eclipses of Jupiter's moons: Did ships tend to carry the requisite equipment?
From: Carl Herzog
Date: 2004 Feb 13, 11:48 -0500
From: Carl Herzog
Date: 2004 Feb 13, 11:48 -0500
A question arose on a mailing list of Patrick O'Brian fans that I thought this group may be better prepared to answer: Apparently, in one of his books, O'Brian's main character is carrying a fairly substantial telescope on board with which to determine longitude by the eclipses of Jupiter's moons. Presumably, he would be conducting these measurements on some remote coastline and not on board. But even assuming that much, the question was, how likely was a British naval ship or its captain to have carried or used such equipment circa 1800? His fan are prone to believing that most of O'Brian's details are drawn from contemporary source material. While the method is commonly discussed in texts of the period, I'm uncertain how prevalent the actual practice was. Carl Herzog
