NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Re: Location Center of Responses thus Far
From: R.H. van Gent
Date: 2001 Jul 24, 4:46 PM
From: R.H. van Gent
Date: 2001 Jul 24, 4:46 PM
Herbert Prinz wrote: > The implementation Robert van Gent suggests does not work in the general case. > This throughs some light on the adequance of George Huxtable's beach ball model. True, my method and anyone else's method will not work if the locations are spread nearly evenly across the globe. Then the resulting vectors will nearly cancel each other out. My method was originally developed, I believe, by people who study ancient geomagnetic poles and want to determine a sort of average pole from a set of individually determined poles located near to each other. The method does has the advantage that it can be easily programmed and from the 18 lat-long pairs mentioned in the recent NAVIGATION-L postings, I have obtained the following position for the centre of gravity (projected onto the Earth's surface) Lat = 57.8 degrees Long = 87.0 West On the atlas, this corresponds with a watery spot in the Hudson Bay, not far from Fort Severn. Of course, this is only interesting as a mathematical exercise and one can justly argue whether this is the best method. I agree that it would be far more practical to organize such a meeting somewhere on the North American east coast, preferably at a location with a maritime tradition. ======================================================== * Robert H. van Gent * Tel/Fax: 00-31-30-2720269 * * Zaagmolenkade 50 * * * 3515 AE Utrecht * E-mail: r.h.vangent@astro.uu.nl * * The Netherlands * * ******************************************************** * Home page: http://www.phys.uu.nl/~vgent/homepage.htm * ========================================================
