NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
From: Uwe Buettner
Date: 2024 Feb 14, 01:21 -0800
I have a question regarding denoting positions of celestials in the sky in this Almanac: Usually, we use forms of degrees, minutes and seconds (or decimals of minutes), or hours, minutes and seconds to describe angles. In this particular Almanac, in addition to degrees, minutes and seconds there is sometimes a fourth unit before degrees, denoted as "s" and somtimes as "h" (this "h" might be a printing error?). See for example on the second page for January 1767 Sun's longitude or on the sixth page of January for Moon's longitude. One "s" seems to contain 30 degrees. Also, in the explanations of this Almanac angles are calculated in "s", degrees, minutes, and seconds.
Can anyone explain to me, what this unit "s" stands for or which quantity is represented?
Thank you and best regards,
Uwe
