Lunar Distance (navigation)
In celestial navigation, lunar distance is the angle between the Moon and another celestial body. A navigator can use a lunar distance (also called a lunar) and a nautical almanac to calculate Greenwich time. The navigator can then determine longitude without a marine chronometer.
Read more about Lunar Distance (navigation): The Reason For Measuring Lunar Distances, Errors, USS Peacock, In Literature
Famous quotes containing the words lunar and/or distance:
“A bird half wakened in the lunar noon
Sang halfway through its little inborn tune.”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)
“The rage for road building is beneficent for America, where vast distance is so main a consideration in our domestic politics and trade, inasmuch as the great political promise of the invention is to hold the Union staunch, whose days already seem numbered by the mere inconvenience of transporting representatives, judges and officers across such tedious distances of land and water.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)