NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Re: Slocum's lunars
From: Frank Reed CT
Date: 2003 Dec 18, 03:52 EST
From: Frank Reed CT
Date: 2003 Dec 18, 03:52 EST
You wrote:
"somehow I had the impression that there really was an error in the log
table. intentional errors were not uncommon in mathematical tables,
sort of the same way map companies put fake streets on the maps, etc."
I don't buy it! First, if you sink a ship, you lose a customer. That's big incentive not to dirty your tables. Second, these tables --whichever ones they might have been-- would have been published in last decades of a century-old method.
Slocum probably was using tables keyed to that era's Bowditch. The prefered method then was Chauvenet's which was relatively new at that time. Slocum probably learned a different method when he was a commercial ship captain. The end of the century method may have puzzled him, and I would bet that details of Chauvenet's method would surprise a lot of the mathematically-inclined lunarians who follow this list.
Frank E. Reed
[X] Mystic, Connecticut
[ ] Chicago, Illinois
"somehow I had the impression that there really was an error in the log
table. intentional errors were not uncommon in mathematical tables,
sort of the same way map companies put fake streets on the maps, etc."
I don't buy it! First, if you sink a ship, you lose a customer. That's big incentive not to dirty your tables. Second, these tables --whichever ones they might have been-- would have been published in last decades of a century-old method.
Slocum probably was using tables keyed to that era's Bowditch. The prefered method then was Chauvenet's which was relatively new at that time. Slocum probably learned a different method when he was a commercial ship captain. The end of the century method may have puzzled him, and I would bet that details of Chauvenet's method would surprise a lot of the mathematically-inclined lunarians who follow this list.
Frank E. Reed
[X] Mystic, Connecticut
[ ] Chicago, Illinois