NavList:

Figure 8.5 on p. 93 in John Karl's book "Celestial Navigation in the GPS Age" displays a lunar-distance worksheet that ends with the UT result of 21h 18m 59m. My lunar_distance.xls spreadsheet calculates 21h 18m 55s from the same input data.  I discussed this with John off the list and we observed that the 4-second difference arises from rounding the lunar distances to the nearest 0.1' in the book while the spreadsheet maintains all digits until the very end.  We also agreed that this difference is insignificant given the precision one might realistically expect from this method.

On another note, the Moon GHA should be 79 degrees instead of 78. This is just a misprint because the rest of the worksheet data are unaffected.


Peter Hakel