NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Re: Azimuth and Declination formulae
From: Lu Abel
Date: 2005 Jul 19, 21:05 -0700
From: Lu Abel
Date: 2005 Jul 19, 21:05 -0700
Whoa on the haversines. It's not half of a sine, it's half of a versine. A versine (x) = 1 - cos (x). Note that vers (x) has a range from 0 to 2. Haversine (x) = vers (x) / 2. This just makes hav (x) have a range from 0 to 1. The whole reason for versines and haversines was to allow sight reductions to be done using logarithms (and therefore the requisite multiplications become additions); but logs are not defined for negative numbers, hence the need to shift everything to have a positive value. Versines and haversines can also be expressed in terms of sine squared, vers (x) = 2 sin^^2 (x/2). As a side note, the traditional formula for the great circle distance between two points breaks down into finding the difference between two nearly equal large quantities for small distances. This can produce inaccurate answers because calculators and computers only carry out calculations with a limited number of digits. The equivalent haversine formula is well behaved, subtracting two small numbers. Therefore all GPS's actually use the haversine formula for calculating the distance between two points. Lu Abel Peter Fogg wrote: >>From: Henry C. Halboth >>A bit more complicated, but generally employed with the Time Sight is ... >> >>hav Z = sec ho x sec L x sin 1/2S - ho x sin 1/2S -L, where ... >> >>Z = azimith, named according to Latitude + meridian angle, E or W >>ho = corrected altitude >>L = Latitude >>pd = polar distance >>S = ho + L + pd > > > Interesting. Presumably 'hav' stands for haversine, which I vaguely recall > is a half sine? And 'sec' is secant? I don't know what that is. > > What do I need to be able to use this formula? Scientific calculators I > have. Do I need tables of havesines and secants? > > What is the advantage of this formula? > >