[time-nuts] establishing your position w/o gps

Attila Kinali attila at kinali.ch
Tue Jan 24 10:58:48 UTC 2012


Moin,

All this talk about telling the time using stars or the sun made me wonder
how did people tell what position their telescopes had back in the days
before GPS? I know that most countries established a coordinate system
in the last 100-200 years. But astronomy has been around much longer and
had the need for precise timing and postioning.

So, how did the gentlemen back in the good old days tell what time it was,
where they were and where they were looking? How was the first global
geodetic system established?

Wikipedia has a few interesting articles, but not much about how it
is actually done.

			Attila Kinali

-- 
The trouble with you, Shev, is you don't say anything until you've saved
up a whole truckload of damned heavy brick arguments and then you dump
them all out and never look at the bleeding body mangled beneath the heap
		-- Tirin, The Dispossessed, U. Le Guin




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