NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Re: Preston's paper on Lewis & Clark's Navigation
From: Bruce Stark
Date: 2003 Jun 8, 14:39 EDT
From: Bruce Stark
Date: 2003 Jun 8, 14:39 EDT
There's a very confusing statement in my last post. I said something to the effect that Preston was trying to understand Lewis and Clark data in terms of twentieth century celestial navigation. That would suggest he was trying to understand it in terms of lines of position, etc. Preston was far beyond that. What he hadn't grasped was how navigators of that era thought about time and longitude. In most cases, we need accurate Greenwich time before we can work observations successfully. The old navigators didn't. This is because, from the old perspective, we've turned things around and put the cart in front of the horse. Bruce