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A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Re: Old style lunar
From: Ken Muldrew
Date: 2004 Dec 15, 23:34 -0700
From: Ken Muldrew
Date: 2004 Dec 15, 23:34 -0700
> It seems that the sad fate of the Lewis and Clark > Lunars did not teach the people who developed > "procedures", that it is better to take altitudes > simultaneously with the Lunars, rather than compute them. Hmmm...The Thompson lunar is 4 years *before* Lewis & Clark set off on their voyage, he accurately mapped about one quarter of the continent without ever taking altitudes simultaneously with the lunars, and the main lesson from L&C (as far as altitudes go) only concerns those who would like to figure out where they made mistakes while pondering their data 200 years later. The source of error in the particular set of lunars by Thompson does not lie in the altitude calculations (although I previously speculated that they might help shed light on just where the error lay). Ken Muldrew.
