NavList:

It is funny how these threads come full circle.  David C. in New Zeland was doing just that - practice shots from a fixed location on land and said you could not plot an azimuth on plain paper which I took to mean that he believed he needed to have a Mecator or Lambert or some other map projection to plot an azimuth and a LOP from one fixed point.

This thread is in the finest tradition of the internet. Today's media seem to think that "social media" is THE  internet [1]. I found it refreshing to watch as a thread I started to explain my difficulties with equal altitude sights morphed into a very interesting discussion about mercator charts. As I sit in my armchair reading navigation texts I can read posts by real aviators and and mariners. Please keep up your posts about your pre-GPS experiences.

The history of sight reduction is very rich. For example, another way of determining lat, long from LOPs is to use the traverse tables found in Norie and other volumes. Or you can work it as a time sight and use tables by Cloudy Weather Johnson to calculate  lat, long without plotting - the methods seem endless.

I was a passenger on the maiden voyage of the Shaw Saville Southern Cross from Southampton to Wellington in 1955. I sometimes wonder what methods were used by the crew, given that the senior members would have gone to sea about the time of WW1 and would have been through WW2. I have not seen a log of the voyage. I was much too young to observe noon sights being taken! I remember that in a lobby there was a world map on which a pin marked our noon position each day. I can recall that just before we arrived in Wellington we travelled down a  barren coast. I suspect that we travelled from Panama and made landfall at Castlepoint light (S 40° 54 01.5'   E° 176° 13 53.2'). I wonder when landfall  lights such as Castllepoint will be  turned off?

[1]  Please, please, please.... do not ever think of moving this group over to Facebook. Another subject I am interested in is now 99.99% FB and the interesting and informative discussions we used to have are a thing of the past. I have lost interest in that subject.