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A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
John Wesley Powell's 1869 Lunar Observations from Grand Canyon
From: Stephen M Kerst
Date: 2018 Sep 17, 11:58 -0700
From: Stephen M Kerst
Date: 2018 Sep 17, 11:58 -0700
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What's special here is that the raw observations were published for the first time in the book 'First Through Grand Canyon' by Michael Ghiglieri (2010).
Richard Quartaroli, formerly a librarian at Northern Arizona University, transcribed Powell's notes for the appendix--but wrote that no one had yet been able to compute latitude and longitude from them--so they remained a mystery to be solved. On inspection, I saw that the observations were for the old historical navigation method used by Captain Cook, Lewis and Clark, and others--the method of Lunar Distances--for figuring longitude.
Bruce Stark had done some work on this five years ago, but there may be no published results.