NavList:

Peter, you wrote:
"One more thing, I also had plans for a Sun-Moon fix (since the phase was near first quarter) but then I realized that was unworkable:
1) I did not have a sea horizon under the Sun,
2) The two bodies were essentially opposite in azimuth, so their LOP's would have been close to parallel anyway - another "tropical" detail that one does not get to see in higher latitudes."

While problematic for a standard two-body fix, that second detail is a really nice feature of tropical lunars under many circumstances. The sextant can be held in a relatively comfortable near-vertical orientation. And under many circumstances, the clearing can be reduced to a "vertical circle" calculation where the corrected distance is just the observed distance +/- the two altitude corrections --with no trigonometric work AT ALL! This is valid far more often than you would expect, as long as the Moon's altitude is properly adjusted (!), and could have saved quite a bit of tedious paperwork historically. When I finally get a time machine, I intend to go back and have a chat with Mr. Maskelyne (of course I already did this, and the results are now well known ...in a parallel quantum reality. Ha!).

-FER

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