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That particular Wikipedia entry is pretty darn awful. It took on its
present form apparently in February of this year (I looked at it about
eight months ago and it wasn't this muddled). The bad sections were
written by someone with an IP address in Canberra, Australia. It's
nobody on this list as far as I can tell. Of course, the nice thing
about Wikipedia is that you can change it if you so desire. It's not
difficult: just click the edit tag above the paragraph. You have to
decide whether it's worth your time --and worth the effort of dealing
with other people will come along and edit *your* text. Your IP
address will be recorded with any edits and displayed in the history
which narrows down your geographic location somewhat, but otherwise
it's relatively anonymous. If that's still too much information, you
can create an account with any user ID you like. People will see that
ID in the history, so you could use your full name if that appeals, or
you could use a completely arbitrary sequence of characters for an ID
and you'll remain completely anonymous.

The explanation as it stands is not literally incorrect. It's just
muddled and confusing. What that author is saying is that if I measure
the Sun-Moon lunar distance at my local noon, and another observer,
who by design is 15 degrees in longitude west of me, measures the Sun-
Moon lunar distance at his local noon, then because local noon occurs
an hour later, the Sun-Moon lunar distance will have changed by about
half a degree (the cleared distance, that is). It's a lot easier to
imagine two observers measuring the Sun-Moon distance at the same
moment in time (same cleared lunar distance) and then comparing their
local times.

I think it's clear that the person who wrote this particular iteration
of the Wikipedia "lunar distance" entry knows only the basics of
navigation and astronomy since the article says that the Sun is "at
its zenith" at local noon. Ouch. This is the sort of thing you have to
keep in mind when reading on Wikipedia. Some of the articles are
maintained by informal teams of experts, and their articles are
excellent. Some of the articles are barely maintained at all, and the
content can be amateurish.

-FER
www.historicalatlas.com/lunars


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