NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
From: David Pike
Date: 2014 Nov 14, 14:11 -0800
During the last couple of decades there’s been lots written about the great Maskelyne v Harrison, Lunars v Chronometer debate for finding longitude in the late 18th century, but relatively little about the day to day practical use of lunar distances.
My question is, did the lunar distance protagonists shoot a lunar distance at every opportunity for a fix, or did they just do so once in a while to correct and rate their good quality but nowhere near perfect for long voyages timepieces, and use normal astro for fixes between times?
In a similar vein, when William Bligh recorded three lat & longs in Bounty’s log, one based on dead reckoning, one based on chronometer K2 time, and one based on lunar time, was the lunar lat & long based on totally independent observations, or did he simply add a lunar derived time correction to his K2 based fixes? http://www.fatefulvoyage.com/logbook/log880117.html
Dave