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A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Missed opportunities, was: Moon eclipse
From: Alexandre Eremenko
Date: 2004 Oct 30, 14:25 -0500
From: Alexandre Eremenko
Date: 2004 Oct 30, 14:25 -0500
According to our experiments with this moon eclipse, the records of similar observations in XIX century, and Frank Reed's assessment of precision of astrolabes, "Assuming roughly two minutes error in eclipse event timings and two minutes error in local time, the average expected error would be about three minutes --less than a degree error in longitude." and "the world could have been mapped in longitude with good accuracy thousands of years ago." This is enormously more precise than you can hope to measure by "dead reckoning" in a land travel. (Speaking, for example of the longitude distances like Paris-Moscow or from Rome-Beijin). Given that the Lunar method was proposed by Hipparchus in III cent BC, it is surprising that it was so rarely used in the following 2000 years, as Herbert Prinz, apparently wery knowlegeable in the history of this question, testifies. But I agree that speculation on "why was this so" is out of the scope of this list. (On my opinion, this is related to the hudge decline in the general attitude to science in the almost 2000 period betweeh Hipparchus and XVIII century.) Alex.