NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Re: Jack Aubrey's fixing of longitude
From: Geoffrey Kolbe
Date: 2011 Jun 20, 12:06 +0100
From: Geoffrey Kolbe
Date: 2011 Jun 20, 12:06 +0100
At 06:39 20/06/2011, you wrote: >Ah, but remember, Jack Aubrey was an accomplished astronomer, he >made his own telescope which was set up at his estate and he had >presented a paper at the Royal Society. > >gl That was later, when he was a post captain on half pay with nothing better to do with his time. I think the observation may have been supposed to be a lunar occultation of Venus. But I cannot make sense of "Two seven four" as a reading. O'Brian is usually pretty good at the historicity of the rest of his Aubrey-Maturin writings and I would have hoped that he would have created a navigation scenario that would have had the smell of authenticity. It would seem not. GK