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First, let me apologize for not writing who I was quoting in my last
message; it was Frank Reed. My reply is in this thread, but it isn't nested
underneath the quoted message. Sorry all.

> Frank Reed wrote:

> For every half hour, starting at 0400 GMT on Dec 3, 1803, I find for
> Aldebaran lunars (apparent center-to-center distances): 60.994 61.268
> 61.522 61.761 61.987 62.200 62.403 62.597 62.785 62.966 63.143 63.314
> 63.483 63.650 63.814 63.967

From this data, we see an almost constant relative motion of the moon of
25"/min over the period of 11:30PM to 1:30AM local time. Despite the
scatter of the L&C data, they measure a relatively constant motion of
18"/min over the same period. I really think that this indicates that they
were measuring the wrong star, and that it was well wide of the moon's
path.

> ... I experimented with errors in
> near limb versus far limb --even near limbs taken from the gibbous
> side of the Moon. But still no luck... (there might still be a little
> life in that idea though).

This was my first thought because I recently made the very same error
and only noticed when I plotted out my data (it looked a lot like L&C's
2nd observation of Aldebaran, George's series C). But it's just too far off,
and they had to be better at this than me.

Ken Muldrew.

   

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