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

Poul-Henning Kamp phk at phk.freebsd.dk
Tue Jan 24 11:04:08 UTC 2012


In message <20120124115848.312d60bd4fccce4f3e71c136 at kinali.ch>, Attila Kinali w
rites:

>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?

Back then the stars were the coordinate system and the position of
the telescope the unknown, so you did it by observing stars with
documented coordinates with your new telescope and then you set
your clock and calculated your lattitude accordingly.

Remember: back then longitude and time were as single convolved coordinate.

-- 
Poul-Henning Kamp       | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20
phk at FreeBSD.ORG         | TCP/IP since RFC 956
FreeBSD committer       | BSD since 4.3-tahoe    
Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence.




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