NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Ex-meridian problem
From: Bruce Stark
Date: 2001 Feb 16, 3:12 PM
From: Bruce Stark
Date: 2001 Feb 16, 3:12 PM
Russell�I could pose your question in a letter to the Nav. Foundation, but turnaround would be slow. The Newsletter comes out only four times a year. As for me, I don't think I can improve on what's already been said by Steven Wepster and others. Perhaps part of the difficulty is that you're mixing local apparent noon into this. Admittedly you're close to LAN in both time and space. But forget about that. What matters is the local hour angle of the sun�the TIME from LAN. The latitude you get is for the place of observation. The advantage of ex-meridians is they require no plotting. They're at their best when the difference between latitude and declination are considerable. Otherwise azimuth changes so fast near meridian passage that a small error in local hour angle causes a substantial error in latitude. Unfortunately that's about the best I can do. Bruce
