NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Re: Sign of v correction to GHA
From: Frank Reed
Date: 2025 Feb 27, 06:10 -0800
From: Frank Reed
Date: 2025 Feb 27, 06:10 -0800
It's important to understand that this poitive/negative v correction business has little to do with astronomy or celestial navigation itself. It is a property of the unique system of interpolation in the modern UK/US Nautical Almanac devised by a handful of people back in the mid-1950s. Other almanacs in other navigation cultures historically (or today) did not (or do not) work this way. It's just a mechanical system of interpolation. Not all that important.
The retrograde motions of the planets --real astronomy-- may seem like the same thing as negative v corrections, but no.
Frank Reed
