NavList:

Looking over just a few pages via amazon's and google's preview function, alas I have already found the usual suspects of oft-repeated myths about celestial navigation. For example, he says that "dead reckoning" comes from "deduced reckoning" which is false. He also says that lunars involved difficult mathematics, which was true only for those practitioners of the method who chose to use difficult mathematics. Otherwise lunars were no more difficult than a common time sight. And he says that it's hard to measure altitudes accurately because of refraction when the body's altitude is below 15 degrees. I also found my online nautical almanac referenced (by a url on a page that I couldn't access in the preview), though apparently with no credit line :). This chapter on celestial navigation bears evidence of being "tacked on" and in fact the author says "the chapter on navigation would have been almost impossible for me to write without extensive coaching and support from colleague, seaman, and friend Joel Silverberg. I would have been lost at sea, almost literally, without his extensive knowledge." Since he has posted recently enough on the NavList message boards, I probably don't have to let folks know that Joel is a NavList member as well as a professional mathematician.

Of course these are minor 'concerns' based on the briefest preview. Given the table of contents, I am confident that the author is more comfortable with the earlier history of the subject and its purely mathematical side. And that, after all, is what the book's title announces. I will certainly buy a copy.

-FER

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