NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Zenith stars and longitude
From: Peter Fogg
Date: 2006 Jun 29, 08:15 +1000
From: Peter Fogg
Date: 2006 Jun 29, 08:15 +1000
Frank wrote: > Yes, you can > get a rough value for LATITUDE by watching zenith stars. But there's > nothing in that technique that can supply longitude. This may well be correct. But I'm still not entirely happy with it (how do you like this new diplomatic approach?). Only if you are in a unique position on the earth's surface - defined by latitude AND longitude - will the star be at the zenith. This is the whole idea. If you are at some unknown spot in the Pacific, observing a zenith star, then you cannot be, say, in the Baltic Sea because if you were that star would not be at your zenith.
