
NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Re: Lunar stuff (was: Calculating accurate apparent-angles between stars)
From: Bruce Stark
Date: 2003 Jan 8, 17:29 EST
From: Bruce Stark
Date: 2003 Jan 8, 17:29 EST
I do embarrass easily Fred, but pressure for an explanation of the Tables isn't an embarrassment. It's a joy. I'm grateful for people's interest. Issue #60 of the Navigation Foundation's "Navigator's Newsletter" has a paper in which I explain the problems and ideas that led me to develop yet another lunar method. The paper also shows the equation, and covers the turning points in working it out from the cosine-haversine and old-style time-sight formulas. The Foundation has published other papers of mine and, perhaps more important for the acceptance of the Tables, Robert Eno's "Field Assessment" of them. Chances are I'd have gotten nowhere without the Navigation Foundation. And, whatever the law says, it seems to me the papers they've published belong to them. Of the individual tables, though, only 2 and 3 were discussed, and that was only to explain why "Q" isn't necessarily the exact arithmetic complement of the "Logarithmic difference." I'd be glad to answer questions about any of the individual tables. Bruce