NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
From: Frank Reed
Date: 2013 May 29, 14:16 -0700
Hello Jacques,
What would you like to know about Witchell's method? It was one among many variants of the standard series solution. It calculated the terms that I refer to as the "corner cosines" by employing right spherical triangles. It was included in editions of Bowditch's "New American Practical Navigator" from 1802 right through 1880. Even in the early years, this seems to have mostly been Nathaniel Bowditch's own personal nostalgia for a calculation that was really no longer of much interest. It offered no particular benefit. It was mathematically identical to other series solutions, which had been developed and refined to make them more efficient in the early 19th century. After the 1840s, it remained in the book probably because there were no lunarians left to judge whether it mattered or not.
-FER
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