NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
New to the list
From: John Huth
Date: 2009 Jun 1, 11:15 -0400
Greetings -
My name is John Huth. I got the name of this list from David Burch.
I'm hoping I can learn a lot from the collective wisdom here. My background: I'm a particle physicist, doing experimental work at the Large Hadron Colllider at CERN.
My interest in navigation goes back quite some ways - I'd taught myself the classic slide-rule/sextant/chronometer techniques. My current main interest is in what I call "primitive navigation", and I'm conducting a Freshman Seminar in this, where we test out various techniques, like using the shadow-stick method to find latitude. We discuss both Polynesian navigation and some of the speculations on Viking navigation. We also do a bit of what David Burch calls "emergency navigation" - using a wrist watch and equation of time to find longitude. We do a lot of memorization of things like the coordinates of major navigational stars, EoT, that kind of stuff.
I hope I can learn from you folks.
I do have one very specific question. I'm writing up a chapter on dead reckoning. There is a quote from Robert Falcon Scott that I'd like to pin down, and I haven't been able to dig it up. In the 1980's Roland Huntford wrote a book, called "The Last Place on Earth", and also a follow on called "Amundsen and Scott". The Last Place on Earth appeared in a Masterpiece Theater series.
Here's what I'm interested in - during the publication of Scott's diaries, there was a number of excisions, which, presumably were done to increase the heroism of Scott. In the last episode of the Masterpiece Theater series, there is a line by a character that I assume was supposed to be Sir Clements Markham, where he proposed to remove a phrase like "We should have kept the bearings of our outward camps" ..... or something like that. I'd actually quoted that to my students, but I realize now that this could have been made up for the series. I was hoping that someone might know if there existed a listing of the excised passages from Scott's diary, or if someone was aware of this particular quote, before I commit it to print.
Many thanks for any help you could provide, or perhaps suggestions of who I could contact for this question.
Best,
John Huth
--~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~
Navigation List archive: www.fer3.com/arc
To post, email NavList@fer3.com
To , email NavList-@fer3.com
-~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
From: John Huth
Date: 2009 Jun 1, 11:15 -0400
Greetings -
My name is John Huth. I got the name of this list from David Burch.
I'm hoping I can learn a lot from the collective wisdom here. My background: I'm a particle physicist, doing experimental work at the Large Hadron Colllider at CERN.
My interest in navigation goes back quite some ways - I'd taught myself the classic slide-rule/sextant/chronometer techniques. My current main interest is in what I call "primitive navigation", and I'm conducting a Freshman Seminar in this, where we test out various techniques, like using the shadow-stick method to find latitude. We discuss both Polynesian navigation and some of the speculations on Viking navigation. We also do a bit of what David Burch calls "emergency navigation" - using a wrist watch and equation of time to find longitude. We do a lot of memorization of things like the coordinates of major navigational stars, EoT, that kind of stuff.
I hope I can learn from you folks.
I do have one very specific question. I'm writing up a chapter on dead reckoning. There is a quote from Robert Falcon Scott that I'd like to pin down, and I haven't been able to dig it up. In the 1980's Roland Huntford wrote a book, called "The Last Place on Earth", and also a follow on called "Amundsen and Scott". The Last Place on Earth appeared in a Masterpiece Theater series.
Here's what I'm interested in - during the publication of Scott's diaries, there was a number of excisions, which, presumably were done to increase the heroism of Scott. In the last episode of the Masterpiece Theater series, there is a line by a character that I assume was supposed to be Sir Clements Markham, where he proposed to remove a phrase like "We should have kept the bearings of our outward camps" ..... or something like that. I'd actually quoted that to my students, but I realize now that this could have been made up for the series. I was hoping that someone might know if there existed a listing of the excised passages from Scott's diary, or if someone was aware of this particular quote, before I commit it to print.
Many thanks for any help you could provide, or perhaps suggestions of who I could contact for this question.
Best,
John Huth
--~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~
Navigation List archive: www.fer3.com/arc
To post, email NavList@fer3.com
To , email NavList-@fer3.com
-~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
