NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
From: Tony Oz
Date: 2018 Nov 7, 23:38 -0800
Dear Steve,
Let me share my [most probably incompetent] point of view on this topic.
You asked:
a. If the zone description sign is dependent upon the context of the discussion, I ask the following question: What would be an example of a legitimate context in which convention needs to be changed in order to satisfy the context?
My answer is - the opposite sign is used when someone needs to figure out the local time at some particular zone given the UT and the description. For example - you want to know when I wrote some message or a file looking at its' timestamp (which - if in UNIX - comes in UT).
You asked:
b. Is there ever any good reason why a navigator would necessarily speak of a zone description west of Greenwich as Negative?
Navigator? Probably there is no such reason. My point of view is the any proper navigator SHOULD use UT throughout, not messing with zone times at all.
Warm regards,
Tony
60°N 30°E
