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A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Lunar Distance
From: Gordon Talge
Date: 2002 Jan 26, 1:02 AM
From: Gordon Talge
Date: 2002 Jan 26, 1:02 AM
To Answer some questions about Lunar Distance. There are no modern navigation texts that teach "Lunar Distance" as other than an historical method. The last time "Lunar distance" tables were in the Nautical Almanac was something like 1914 or 1917. I have a 1917 edition of Bowditch and the articles on lunar distance had already been dropped. The best way to find out how the method was really used is to get a hold of something like an 1840 copy of Norie's Navigation text book. BTW, the treatment of trigonometry in the navigation texts such as Norie and others back before 1880 is quite different than that presented in texts today. They made the change around the 1890s to how it is taught now. The results are of course are the same, but the way of looking at and setting up a trig problem, and the way the trig functions were defined, was quite a bit different and really takes some getting use to. -- Gordon -- ,,, (. .) +-------------------------ooO-(_)-Ooo-----------------------+ | Gordon Talge WB6YKK e-mail: gtalge@pe.net | | Department of Mathematics Long Beach, CA | | Wilson High School | | (o- Debian / GNU / Linux | | //\ The Choice of the GNU Generation | | v_/_ .oooO | | - E Aho Laula - ( ) Oooo. - Wider is Better - | +-------------------------\ (---( )------------------------+ \_) ) / (_/