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A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Interesting challenge
From: Lu Abel
Date: 2012 Aug 5, 10:41 -0700
From: Lu Abel
Date: 2012 Aug 5, 10:41 -0700
When celestial navigators draw a LOP, it's usually by the altitude-intercept method, ie, "here's where I think I am, but where would I have to be to see get this Ho?"
A friend asked me the following: "If I know my [great circle] distance from three points on earth, can I determine my location?" Of course one can. But beyond getting a globe and using dividers or a string to draw arcs of the proper distance on it, is there a mathematical/paper-and-pencil way of determining latitude and longitude? I guess the celnav equivalent would be determining location from three sights (or each of the two possible positions from two sights) with no assumed position.
Lu
