NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
From: Kieran Kelly
Date: 2005 Jan 1, 15:38 +1100
Frank Reed wrote of a disappointed mariner awaiting a lunar
eclipse in 1844. Bad weather, eclipses and disappointment must have gone hand
in hand for those who depended on the sky to determine where they were. I quote
the following:
“5th
April 1856……At 2.10pm encamped on a large creek with a gravelly channel twenty yards
wide. Fahey obtained a large quantity of mussels from the pools in the creek;
they proved an excellent addition to our supper, though rather deficient in
flavour. The weather was cloudy, and though there was an occasional sight of the
sun, we could observe neither the commencement or end of the solar eclipse. I was
therefore unable to avail myself of it for correcting the longitude.
Latitude
by ε Argus 17 degs 9 mins 6 secs
Journal of
Augustus Gregory
North
Australian Expedition 1856
The use of
eclipses to correct chronometers, on both land and sea, may have been more prevalent
then we think.
Kieran
Kelly
