NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
From: Douglas Denny
Date: 2010 Sep 23, 00:33 -0700
Sorry. Typo error.
Correction:-
The Moon moves against the background of stars by 30 minutes of arc in one hour.
i.e. one minute of arc in two minutes of time.
i.e. one second of arc in two seconds of time.
Hence a sextant measurement of one second of arc is needed to obtain two seconds in time accuracy, (ignoring any other errors in the method).
As normally only a half a minute of arc is probably the best that can normally be expected or regularly achieved with a sextant (and that only if it is perfectly free from errors in the divisions of the scale and the index error is known to that accuracy) then that implies a theoretical accuracy in time for Lunar Distances of one minute in time achieved.
Douglas Denny.
Chichester. England.
----------------------------------------------------------------
NavList message boards and member settings: www.fer3.com/NavList
Members may optionally receive posts by email.
To cancel email delivery, send a message to NoMail[at]fer3.com
----------------------------------------------------------------