NavList:

Let me add that the longitude of Point Venus
(Cooks observatory has a memorial sign) which I determined from
Terraserver is 149d 29'6.

Alex.

On Mon, 7 Jan 2013, Henry Halboth wrote:

It's rather refreshing to see the subject of Lunars again being discussed.
For those who may be interested, I post, without comment, the following
excerpt from Captain (later Admiral) Bligh's narrative concerning his
second voyage to Tahiti, as first published in 1792.

"The result of the mean of 50 sets of lunar observations taken by me on
shore, gives for the Longitude of Point Venus                 210 33 57 E
Captain Cook, in 1769, places it in    210 27 30
In 1777, his last voyage                    210 22 28"

Regards,

Henry

On Mon, Jan 7, 2013 at 3:30 PM, Frank Reed <FrankReed---com>wrote:

Hanno Ix, you wrote:
"I wonder if the ephemeris especially of the moon as used by Cook can
still be studied today. Naturally, Cooks errors cannot have been any
smaller than the ones of those."

Even better. Although we can certainly study the tables (Mayer) that were
used to generate the early Nautical Almanacs, we may as well jump straight
to the product itself. Very nearly all Nautical Almanac editions from the
first in 1767 through the early 20th century are available in full on
Google Books. To compare these with correct values (as nearly as can be
determined given some continuing small uncertainties in delta-T for that
era), we need lunar distance tables given, preferably in degrees, minutes,
and seconds, as was normal back then, and we need those tables for the
rather unusual argument of GAT, Greenwich Apparent Time, which was standard
before the switch to GMT which came in 1834 (and was considered seriously
late by commentators at the time). Back in 2004 I made available online
software which does just that. I am attaching an image of a portion of the
tables for Sun-Moon lunar distances from August 1767 compared against data
from my online app for the same dates, lined up to match the tabular format
of the old Nautical Almanac. As you can see, there are cases where the
difference is as large as 50 seconds of arc, but there are others where the
difference is only 1 second of arc. For an "average" lunar this will add an
uncertainty equivalent to an error of something like 0.25' in the distance.
Whatever the observational error may be, this error would sometimes
increase it and other times cancel it out. On average two sources of error
add as the square root of the sum of the squares, so if they had, let's
say, 0.25' error from observations, then the net error would be
sqrt(2)*0.25 or about 0.35' (equivalent to 42 seconds in time or 10' in
longitude). By 1805 the errors in the lunar distance tables had been
significantly reduced. By 1875, they were nearly perfect for navigational
use (though lunars were essentially obsolete at sea by that date, there
were still a handful of practitioners, and there were definitely lunarians
on land, exploring and mapping Africa, for example).

-FER


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