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    Re: Transcription of Worsley's Log
    From: Frank Reed
    Date: 2009 Mar 22, 18:19 -0700

    I'm just quickly scanning some of these messages, so I apologize if this has been brought up already...
    
    The type of navigation you're seeing in Worsley's logbook is 100% standard for 
    this period of time. You may want to look at Dave W.'s run-through of a page 
    from a "Navigational Notebook" from the Charles W. Morgan from 1896 located 
    here: http://www.fer3.com/arc/m2.aspx?i=027590. As you can see the haversine 
    method of working time sights was used there, too, day-after-day for months 
    on end. In fact, it seems to have been quite the norm in this period. Also 
    determining bearings and dlon dlat etc by calculation or table look-up rather 
    than plotting (as we might do it today) was standard.
    
    There's a misconception, sometimes repeated on NavList, that navigators were 
    all using celestial lines of position at least by 1900 (some even think that 
    this occurred shortly after Sumner's initial publication over fifty years 
    earlier), and it just isn't true. While some navies encouraged (even 
    required?) their navigators to use the "New Navigation" it was not popular 
    otherwise. Again and again, you will find authors bemoaning the low profile 
    of the New Navigation in some circles. As late as the Second World War, most 
    navigators on merchant ships still got their positions via morning/afternoon 
    time sights for longitude, Noon Sun for latitude, and DR to keep everything 
    up-to-date in between. Celetial LOPs were the exception. Of course, in 
    history, there are always exceptions and exceptions *to* the exceptions, but 
    "normal" navigation did not fully convert to the modern approach until the 
    post-war period.
    
    Even in the late 1970s, just after I had learned "modern" celestial navigation 
    via HO229 and plotting LOPs, I remember talking with an old navigator about 
    celestial navigation, and I recall being a little disturbed that I couldn't 
    figure out what the heck he was talking about. Why did he want to shoot the 
    Sun when it was near the prime vertical (irrelevant to celestial LOPs but 
    important for time sights). After some time, I realized that he had learned 
    his navigation aboard merchant vessels in the 1940s and he still navigated in 
    the 1970s by the methods he had learned 35 years earlier: time sights and 
    Noon Sun.
    
    -FER
    
    
    
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