NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Re: No sextant, no watch, no almanach, nothing
From: Alexandre Eremenko
Date: 2004 Nov 7, 19:42 -0500
From: Alexandre Eremenko
Date: 2004 Nov 7, 19:42 -0500
On Sat, 6 Nov 2004, Dr. Geoffrey Kolbe wrote: > Well, yes the voyage was planned using an almanac. I don't think this was what Frank had in mind when he overed his puzzle: to memorize almanac data. But I hope he will eventually tell us what he had in mind. > Voyagers like the Polynesians, > for example, who roamed the Pacific seas with > "no sextant, no watch, no > almanac, nothing", I suppose they also did not have compass, so DR was not available to them, and they had to rely on CelNav entirely. So I would be interested to know more details on how exactly they did it. It is easy to imagine for me how they determine latitude. What is really hard to imagine, that they could determine longitude by their Cel Nav methods, even roughly. > An almanac just happens to be one of _our_ ways of > passing on this sort of information. I disagree with "just one":-) Based on what I know, it is also a "better", "superior" way in comparison with what other cultures invented. In the sense that it gives better precision. Of course one can argue that other cultures did not need better precision for their needs, with this I don't argue. (Correct me if I am wrong here). Alex.