NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Direction and alternate methods
From: Doug Royer
Date: 2003 Jun 10, 10:52 -0700
From: Doug Royer
Date: 2003 Jun 10, 10:52 -0700
My opinion on this,for what it's worth,is to let the discussions evolve and go where they will.One reason is because the older members of the list have most likely discussed the topics of navigation ad nauseum and need other stimuli to keep interested.Anyone can post a question or answer on any topic on this list so why limit it.If a person has no interest in the thread of the moment he can choose not to get involved or start another topic while the origonal topic is being discussed at the same time. Last week Jared wrote a post about error and useing a crayon.I found it to be refreshing and an alternate method of looking at a problem.Like Jared I get a headache when all this math is talked about.I am intertested in doing Lunar distance observations but find the arithmatic and steps of the corrections and the math of the proceedure tireing and tedious at best.I find myself not wanting to complete one because of the tedious calculations involved.I searched bookstores and sites on the net to find another method because of my interest in completeing a Lunar. A year ago I downloaded a tutorial about useing alternative methods to calculate differant navigational problems.I started reading through the pages and came to a chapter (chapter 7) that dealt with useing Lunar observations to find time and longitude.The proceedure is called "Finding Time and Longitude useing Lunar Distances by the Intercept Method".It has half the number of calculations and corrections as does the method used by Thompson (and others) and doesn't require the actual measurement of the distance angle between the bodies involved.Have any of you heard of or used this method?Would it be a topic of discussion that would interest you?Unfortunately I only saved the hard copies of the download and can't remember where I downloaded it from.If someone is interested I will research and find where I got it and post the site on list because I don't have the skill or time to draw the diagrams used to illistrate the proceedure and send them to the list. For my part I am going to study the proceedure closely the next few days and try it useing the data I got from the Lunars I observed in May.