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A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Re: George, is there a Part 4c?
From: Fred Hebard
Date: 2004 Sep 26, 17:31 -0400
From: Fred Hebard
Date: 2004 Sep 26, 17:31 -0400
On Sep 26, 2004, at 5:00 PM, Jim Thompson wrote: > 2. How might a backyard or small boat lunartic do it today with a > handheld > calculator, following on Frank Reed's "Easy Lunars" method? > The approximate lunar methods, of which Frank Reed's is one, were developed for ease of calculation using tables. Using a calculator rather than tables, there is a sharp diminution in the difference in difficulty between the approximate and exact methods. An advantage of the exact methods is that one _might_ become more aware of the underlying math and geometry, which are obscured in the series expansions underlying the approximate methods. (BTW, since I reduce all mine in a spreadsheet on a computer, this advantage is lost)!
