NavList:

George wrote:-
"..I hope Douglas will tell us whether he has actually looked at the table
that I pointed to, with its inconsistencies in deduced longitude, before
attributing those results to eye defects..."

You are extrapolating what I said into an unwarranted assertion that I am attributing these inconsistencies to eye defects. I have not said that.

I have said that you are making a conclusion from your own analysis of the results, that the _observers_ and their observations are inconsistent - not the sextants: but you seem reluctant to accept that conclusion.

I am merely offering other possible explanations, when you attribute the inconsistencies to transcribing erors - which seems very far fetched to me. I would have expected Cook and any other navigator of the time to write down exactly what they found. They were trained to do that very thing, and practised it daily.
You do seem to be reluctant to accept physiological visual possibilities for error producing phenomena in sight taking. But they do exist even if you want to deny them.

Douglas Denny.
Chichester. England.
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