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A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Re: Lunar Distance in Wikipedia
From: Frank Reed CT
Date: 2007 Jul 22, 16:27 -0700
From: Frank Reed CT
Date: 2007 Jul 22, 16:27 -0700
That particular Wikipedia entry is pretty darn awful. It took on its present form apparently in February of this year (I looked at it about eight months ago and it wasn't this muddled). The bad sections were written by someone with an IP address in Canberra, Australia. It's nobody on this list as far as I can tell. Of course, the nice thing about Wikipedia is that you can change it if you so desire. It's not difficult: just click the edit tag above the paragraph. You have to decide whether it's worth your time --and worth the effort of dealing with other people will come along and edit *your* text. Your IP address will be recorded with any edits and displayed in the history which narrows down your geographic location somewhat, but otherwise it's relatively anonymous. If that's still too much information, you can create an account with any user ID you like. People will see that ID in the history, so you could use your full name if that appeals, or you could use a completely arbitrary sequence of characters for an ID and you'll remain completely anonymous. The explanation as it stands is not literally incorrect. It's just muddled and confusing. What that author is saying is that if I measure the Sun-Moon lunar distance at my local noon, and another observer, who by design is 15 degrees in longitude west of me, measures the Sun- Moon lunar distance at his local noon, then because local noon occurs an hour later, the Sun-Moon lunar distance will have changed by about half a degree (the cleared distance, that is). It's a lot easier to imagine two observers measuring the Sun-Moon distance at the same moment in time (same cleared lunar distance) and then comparing their local times. I think it's clear that the person who wrote this particular iteration of the Wikipedia "lunar distance" entry knows only the basics of navigation and astronomy since the article says that the Sun is "at its zenith" at local noon. Ouch. This is the sort of thing you have to keep in mind when reading on Wikipedia. Some of the articles are maintained by informal teams of experts, and their articles are excellent. Some of the articles are barely maintained at all, and the content can be amateurish. -FER www.historicalatlas.com/lunars --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send email to NavList@fer3.com To , send email to NavList-@fer3.com -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---