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A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Re: ? ? ? Re: Lewis & Clark
From: Ken Muldrew
Date: 2004 May 26, 14:53 -0600
From: Ken Muldrew
Date: 2004 May 26, 14:53 -0600
On 26 May 2004 at 15:57, Bruce Stark wrote: > The only part I can't understand is where you say " . . . It took me a while to figure out just what Thompson was doing because he left no calculations whatsoever in his journals (also, his handwriting can be brutally difficult to read). I think I have a pretty good handle on it now, though, so if you allow me a day or two to write it up, I'll post the details along with some journal excerpts to back up my claims. Let me quickly clear up the point about division, though. Fidler takes a run of 10 sights for a particular lunar distance, writing down the time and distance for each sight. He then adds them up and shifts the decimal place over to get an average value. Thompson takes 6 or 7 (sometimes 8) sights, adds the values and then divides by 6, 7 (or 8) to get an average. The average distance is then adjusted for index error and semidiameter(s) and then it is cleared. I didn't mean to imply that the uncleared distance was the true distance, but let me leave any further elaboration until I can present a more coherent argument. Ken Muldrew