NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Re: A few new questions
From: Frank Reed CT
Date: 2006 May 13, 03:33 EDT
From: Frank Reed CT
Date: 2006 May 13, 03:33 EDT
Guy S, you wrote: "When using the Casio fx 260 calculator and converting the angle 58 deg 41 min 18 sec to sin it gives me .854353027. In excel if I take 58 + 41/60 + 18/3600 and sum that it is 58.68833333333 Using the sin function on that sum I get 0.84251063010 Why the difference?" The casio fx260 is correct. You may not have realized that spreadsheet trig functions generally require their arguments in radians. This means you have to take your angle and divide by 180/pi, which is approximately equal to 57.29577951. In Excel, but not necessarily other spreadsheet software, there is a simple function that will do this for you. Let's suppose cell A1 contains an angle in degrees. If you want the sine of that in cell A2, enter the formula =SIN(RADIANS(A1)). There is a corresponding DEGREES function to convert angles in radians into degrees. The fact that your two calculations --fx260 vs spreadsheet with wrong formula-- gave such similar answers is a freak accident in this case. For that angle, they just happen to be close. You asked: "Does anyone know of a desktop version (adult size version) of the Casio fx 260 or equivalent calculator? I like the sexagesimal functions and would like larger input keys." I don't know of a machine like that, but have you looked at the calculator program in Windows? If you click on the View menu, you can turn it into a scientific calculator with the usual trig capabilities. There are plenty of keyboard shortcuts. For example, if you type "45" then "s" you get the sine of 45 degrees. Or "o" gives the cosine. The keyboard shortcuts are in the Help menu, but you'll have to dig around. -FER 42.0N 87.7W, or 41.4N 72.1W. www.HistoricalAtlas.com/lunars
