NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Re: Celestial navigation and the spherical Earth
From: Brian Walton
Date: 2018 Jul 30, 00:31 -0700
From: Brian Walton
Date: 2018 Jul 30, 00:31 -0700
If you fly a modern long-haul jet on a great circle route roughly westwards, by day, and have a bubble sextant handy, you can sight the horizon ahead, and aft of either beam, from the cockpit. You will find the horizon is about -3° in all directions. 12 hours later, 6,000 miles further on, heading greatly different, and probably still daylight, the horizon will still be -3° in all directions.
Go figure. GBS and George Orwell wouldn’t have thought of that.
Brian Walton
