NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Re: Extracting the HP of the Moon from the Nautical Almanac dailypages
From: Stan K
Date: 2015 Feb 6, 19:34 -0500
From: Stan K
Date: 2015 Feb 6, 19:34 -0500
Thanks, Frank. The score is now: Whole hour of the sight 3, closest whole hour 0. Unfortunately, it looks like the powers that be are sticking with the closest whole hour, and I have to adjust Celestial Tools accordingly.
Stan
-----Original Message-----
From: Frank Reed <NoReply_FrankReed@fer3.com>
To: slk1000 <slk1000@aol.com>
Sent: Fri, Feb 6, 2015 5:47 pm
Subject: [NavList] Re: Extracting the HP of the Moon from the Nautical Almanac dailypages
From: Frank Reed <NoReply_FrankReed@fer3.com>
To: slk1000 <slk1000@aol.com>
Sent: Fri, Feb 6, 2015 5:47 pm
Subject: [NavList] Re: Extracting the HP of the Moon from the Nautical Almanac dailypages
Stan, you wrote:
"In 'real life' this is pretty unimportant, since the HP never varies by more than 0.1' from one hour to the next"
"In 'real life' this is pretty unimportant, since the HP never varies by more than 0.1' from one hour to the next"
Exactly! COMPLETELY unimportant. The choice is not tough: do you want to give students instructions that are more accurate by at most a tenth of a minute of arc (which translates to even less than that for average altitudes), or give them instructions that are less prone to error and do not introduce a pointless extra step. If you're actually writing "practical" instructions, the first choice, going for a trivial improvement in accuracy, would be foolish, wouldn't it? If you are working on the last line at the bottom of a page, would you really want navigators turning to the next page to get that HP from the next line??
Use the easy one line data lookup.
Use the easy one line data lookup.
Frank Reed
Conanicut Island USA
Conanicut Island USA