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Fred you wrote:
"Sun-moon lunars are still giving me fits, whereas I've had some  nice
ones with Jupiter. "

That's very odd. Maybe there's more  irradiation in the water where you live.
Are you in a high Irradon area??  :-)

And wrote:
"Another problem I've had with lunars is that I was using  what I thought
was a faithful representation of Young's method of clearing,  as put
forth by Geo. Huxtable.  It doesn't give the same results as  Frank
Reed's lunars page, usually giving cleared distances about 0.3' of  arc
away from Frank's. "

Don't forget, there *was* a bug in my  calculator last fall (I didn't realize
so many people were using it so I was  modifying with it rather casually).
Regardless, this clearing process is really  not a difficult calculation and
there shouldn't be any problem with it. If you  don't shoot the altitudes along
with the lunar distance, I think it's important  to emphasize that the
additional calculation of the altitudes introduces an  extra layer of potential error.

Incidentally, this idea that there is a  "Young's method" I think is way
over-sold by Cotter's book. It's a minor  modification of the basic triangle
solution which has been understood for  centuries. The "basic triangle solution" is
two lines of work  followed by a "voila" in Mendoza y Rios's paper in the
Transactions of the Royal  Society in 1797.

-FER
42.0N 87.7W, or 41.4N  72.1W.
www.HistoricalAtlas.com/lunars

   

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