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A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
From: David Pike
Date: 2026 Apr 6, 09:32 -0700
Having found a method of calculating latitude from two simultaneous star altitudes, I tried it on the 165E problem. Looking at the SHAs of the stars in the photograph, it appeared that Procyon and Rigel would give a sufficiently wide XPX triangle to produce a nice diagram. The ‘unchecked’ latitudes I found are 0° 46’N and 52° 00.2’ S. I don’t think you’d get palm trees at 52S, so I’m assuming the latitude required is 0° 46’N. Photographs of my working are attached. I must stress that I’ve not had chance to check my figures yet. Just doing it once takes forever using only an aged Casio scientific calculator, so please feel free to shoot it full of holes.
Unfortunately, a Google Maps search for a matching church produced nothing down the 160-170E longitude band. This might be due to an error on my part, the problems of estimating Ho, or perhaps we’re not at 165E.
I managed to avoid scratching my PC screen while measuring by folding a sheet of paper and holding it against my screen while I made marks indicating the distance between stars with my pencil. DaveP
