NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
From: Dale Lichtblau
Date: 2025 Apr 28, 09:54 -0700
The initial (Morse/CW) distress signal (CQD) gave a lat-lon position several miles west of its now known actual sinking position, possibly contributing to a delay in reaching the disaster by the Carpathia.
Samuel Halpern has suggested that this error was the result of a simple one minute misreading of the navigation watch, leading to a subsequent error (15 minutes-of-arc) in fixing the ship's position (using the earlier in the evening's star sights). Looking at the details, I can easily see how I could make a similar misreading of a chronometer. (Indeed, Halpern admits doing the same when first writing up the article.) I'm wondering how common this type of error is in the world of celestial navigation…?
See It's a CQD Old Man: 41 46 North, 50 14 West, https://www.encyclopedia-titanica.org/its-a-cqd-old-man-4146-north-5014-west.html
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Dale Lichtblau
