Some Links Relevant to Lunars


Read Joshua Slocum's "Sailing Alone Around the World". It's a sailing adventure and self-discovery tale with one of the most quotable accounts of "shooting a lunar" ever written. The complete book is available for free download or online reading here:
Sailing Alone Around the World
Note that Slocum's book has recently been re-released in a nice paperback edition for the National Geographic Adventure Classics series.

Dana's "Two Years Before the Mast" has some interesting references to lunars. This tale of a voyage to the Pacific is similar to Slocum's but understandably less modern in its outlook. The complete book is online:
Two Years Before the Mast

Arthur Pearson has assembled a nice web site devoted to lunar distances. Visit his site here:
LunarDistance.com

The G.W. Blunt White Library at Mystic Seaport in Mystic, Connecticut has an extensive collection of materials online relevant to lunars including logbooks from many whaling vessels, a complete scan of an old Nautical Almanac from 1805, and a copy of "Norie" from 1828. J.W. Norie's navigation manual can be considered the British equivalent to Bowditch. It includes detailed instructions for observing and clearing lunar distance observations as well as extensive accounts of other 19th century navigation methods. The library's digital collection is here:
G.W. Blunt-White Library at Mystic Seaport
The main web site for the museum:
MysticSeaport.org

Other Links


Some links and animations I've assembled on the magnetic variation. Measuring the variation was a method of finding the longitude that almost worked.
Magnetic Variation/Declination

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