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A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
From: Frank Reed
Date: 2014 Jun 12, 11:57 -0700
Brad and Alan,
Sorry, I should have used a different adjective. By "modern" sight reduction tables, I meant the direct antecedents of the later "rapid" sight reduction tables like Pub.249 and 229. It had occurred to me that this might have been why people did not directly reply to Patrick's original question. In the broadest sense, sight reduction tables could include all the various trig tables designed with navigation in mind over the course of a couple of centuries. But, if I have understood him correctly, Patrick was specifically asking about the origin of the "rapid" sight reduction tables, and this is a lineage that apparently begins, in the UK, just before the Second World War. Some of this is just "splitting" versus "lumping" as with any attempt at building a phylogeny --a tree fof the relationships among these tools and techniques. Are there lots of branches of sight reduction methods? Or just a couple of branches with a few triggy twigs on them?
-FER
