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To Answer some questions about Lunar Distance.

There are no modern navigation texts that teach "Lunar Distance"
as other than an historical method.

The last time "Lunar distance" tables were in the Nautical Almanac
was something like 1914 or 1917. I have a 1917 edition of Bowditch
and the articles on lunar distance had already been dropped.

The best way to find out how the method was really used is to
get a hold of something like an 1840 copy of Norie's Navigation
text book.

BTW, the treatment of trigonometry in the navigation texts such
as Norie and others back before 1880 is quite different than that
presented in texts today. They made the change around the 1890s
to how it is taught now.


The results are of course are the same, but the way of looking at
and setting up a trig problem, and the way the trig functions
were defined, was quite a bit different and really takes some
getting use to.


-- Gordon

--
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| Gordon Talge WB6YKK                 e-mail: gtalge@pe.net |
| Department of Mathematics           Long Beach, CA        |
| Wilson High School                                        |
| (o-    Debian / GNU / Linux                               |
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