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A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Re: lunars hard to shoot
From: Nigel Gardner
Date: 2000 Sep 14, 4:04 PM
From: Nigel Gardner
Date: 2000 Sep 14, 4:04 PM
Use of back Sight In the 1805 edition of Norie's Epitome he says, [The back sight is used] '... when the observer's back is towards the object, and it is brought over to the opposite part of the Horizon, and is thence called a back observation. This latter method of observing is very seldom used and is required only when the Horizon under the object is broken by adjacent shores, or rendered indistinct by fogs or other impediments' I recollect reading somewhere that it could also be used say for Polaris when the Northern horizon was no longer visible but the Southern Horizon was still illuminated. Norie gives four different methods for finding the Lunar Distance but it requires the tabulated distances from the Almanac to find Longitude, which last included in 1907. The 1967 Nautical Almanac included them to mark its bicentenery. Nigel Gardner
