NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Re: Lunars,
From: Nigel Gardner
Date: 2002 Mar 19, 18:05 -0500
From: Nigel Gardner
Date: 2002 Mar 19, 18:05 -0500
George, I have just acquired a copy of Riddle's 'Treatise on Navigation', sadly it is a third edition dated 1836. Interestingly the publisher is new to me in terms of known nautical books which was then as now a specialised market. What is interesting about it (among other things) is an auxiliary table reducing Dec, RA and ET "...with sufficient exactness at sea, for nearly sixty years to come, without the aid of a nautical almanac......" , Finding Longitude by the occultation of Jupiter's moons, the usual lunars (relying on tabulated values for cleared distances), and rather more on Lunars in general than his contemporary writers. An insight on the change in the use of English is shown by the heading for a set of problems for the reader to work out entitled "Promiscuous Questions for Exercise" NG
