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A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Re: Compass card with more than 360 degrees
From: Lu Abel
Date: 2006 Apr 7, 08:07 -0700
From: Lu Abel
Date: 2006 Apr 7, 08:07 -0700
I've lost track a bit of the 400 whatevers around the compass, but you are talking about grads (you'll even find the measurement on some calculators). 400 grads in a circle. We think of the metric system being firmly established in the world, but only a part of it -- measurement of distance and temperature -- is universal. Grads were part of the original metric system, an attempt to make arc measurements more convenient than the 360 degrees inherited from the ancient world (Babylonians?). Interestingly, so was a new time measurement -- the French divided the day into 10 hours, each hour into 100 minutes, each minute into 100 seconds. That makes a metric second just a tiny bit smaller than our usual second. Just imagine what metric time would mean for navigators -- no borrow/carry mistakes calculating time intervals! Lu Abel cfi@licfi.com wrote: > Original Message: Sure I remember it , but can you still box it? Clyde > > If you mean: 400/000 = N , 050 = NE , 100 = E , 150 = SE , 200 = S , > 250 = SW , 300 = W 350 = NW ? > That I can do; can I convert back & forth between 400 & 360 ? Not without > a doing some mult/div (on paper - not in my head) and that was the problem > at the time too; if you were told to "Fly 350 deg LOCARS" and you had a > regular compass you had to stop & convert. > -Greg > > > -------------------------------------------------------------------- > mail2web - Check your email from the web at > http://mail2web.com/ . > >
