NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
From: John Karl
Date: 2013 Aug 12, 20:26 -0700
Well, I keep finding out that my book has nothing new in it. Here's a paragraph from my book explaining the "the interesting problem from 1828."
Latitude without Meridian Shots or UT
It’s also possible to obtain latitude from star shots, away from the meridian and without a knowledge of UT. The essentially simultaneous observation of two (or better, three or four) stars gives a fix, determining both latitude and longitude. And if the time used for reducing the sights were incorrect, the SHA of all the stars are incorrect, but all by the same amount, in the same direction. Hence their LHAs are also all incorrect by the same amount, in the same direction. This means that only the longitude is wrong, not the latitude. Thus we can find latitude from stars without meridian sights or UT. So without a knowledge of UT onboard, there are quite a few possibilities for obtaining latitude: daytime meridian shots of the sun, moon, and possibly Venus; nighttime meridian shots of the moon; and morning and evening twilight shots of the stars, whether they’re on the meridian or not.
JK
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