NavList:

Henry,

Thanks for mentioning Bligh's lunars. Bligh used lunars for, what I would call, "surveying" or mapping purposes, as in his long run of observations of the longitude of Point Venus, and he also used them quite successfully for the live navigation of the Bounty at sea.

I don't remember if you were following NavList messages actively in the Spring of 2010. I wrote up a comparison between the lunars aboard the Bounty and the lunars aboard the American merchant vessel Reaper twenty years later in a NavList post in April 2010:
http://fer3.com/arc/m2.aspx/Lunars-Bounty-Reaper-FrankReed-apr-2010-g12816

While my text in that post may not be "stellar", you may find the "lunar" graphics entertaining since the whole voyage of the Bounty is charted out with the locations where lunars were used marked as yellow squares. You'll note that the use of lunars correlates rather nicely in most cases with the phase of the Moon. Lunars were most useful, and most popular for a few days around First Quarter and a few days around Last Quarter. These graphics were also a significant basis for my one of my presentations at the National Maritime Museum at their little "After Longitude" conference this past March.

-FER

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