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A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Re: Name for sixty nautical miles
From: Peter Monta
Date: 2016 Mar 18, 01:42 -0700
From: Peter Monta
Date: 2016 Mar 18, 01:42 -0700
- nautical darc (degree arc)
- nautical tristride (from the seven-league boots) (a little too cute perhaps)
For the first one, clearly we should revise all the textbooks, replacing "nautical mile" with "nautical marc". More seriously, I sometimes find it handy to know that a nautical sarc is about 30 meters.
Frank, in some sense the metric angles did catch on a little, at least in the niche domain of European surveying instruments. To this day, angles are reported in gon, centigon, and, if you can believe it, centi-centigon or cc. For example, a good total station might have an accuracy of 1 cc or so (~0.3 arcsec). My Wild/Leica T2002 (an electronic theodolite from the 1980s) can display in degrees, or gon/c/cc, or the even more obscure mil, which is (2*pi/6400) radian, close to one milliradian.
Cheers,
Peter
