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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: 2020 Feb 2, 19:56 -0800
That was a typo, I believe. I am confident that Gary meant HO 218 as the predecessor to HO 249. Like 249, it included tables of Altitude and Azimuth entered by Latitude and Hour Angle. If I remember correctly from Gary's descriptions of these tables from 2011 (or so), they were originally produced in the UK and were shared with the US as partial payment during the Lend-Lease program. I bought a couple of volumes back in 2011 and on the cover at the top is a sequence of seven X's. Behnd the X's, if I look carefully, there is text which I think says "Restricted". The tables were considered valuable and secret (restricted). Postwar, the more extensive 249 tables were modeled on the earlier 218 "with feedback from WW2 aviators", just as you say.
The receipt for the purchase in 2011 for the volume in front of me says that the seller was in Ventura, California, which is funny because that's where Gary lives (or at least where he lived in 2011). Just a coincidence.
Frank Reed
