NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
From: David Iwancio
Date: 2024 Mar 20, 17:41 -0700
Frank:
Thanks for the PDF, it has now been added to my hoard of such documents. And while I'm not comfortable with German, I'm better at it than I am at Latin.
In my opinion as a layperson, the heaviest lifting done by Chauvenet's boast in your first quote is the part about "processes of a kind... familiar to practical men." I'd wager there wasn't much in the way of formalized user research at the time, but even if "futzing around with tables of logarithms" was "familiar" to navigators it doesn't mean such processes were comfortable or used regularly.
I get the impression that it was common in the Nineteenth Century for passing ships to share information they had on their current longitude with each other, and I find it interesting that they're sharing "longitude" and not simply "chronometer time." This implies that time sight calculations themselves were considered burdensome and were already in the "I can do it if I must, but I'd rather not" category.
Heck, user research by almanac offices in the middle of the Twentieth Century indicated that navigators were avoiding even using the moon's altitude, in part because of the extra steps involved in clearing it.
At any rate, no method of clearing lunar distances is going to save you from errors in the almanac. I noticed that the search for the wreck of the Endurance involved having to correct for errors in the moon's position in an almanac publisehd as late as 1914. Maybe the astronomy community was too focused on blaming their own failings on others...
