Talk:Longitude prize
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He used very accurate clocks and measurements of the height of the sun. However, the Longitude Board set up to administer the prize refused to beleive that longitude could be determined without astronomical measures.
- How are "measurements of the height of the sun" not "astronomical measures"? (Furthermore, how does that help when you're in fog and can't measure the sun?) Brion VIBBER
- Maybe because measuring the height of the sun was everyday work on a ship while measuring the positions of the moon and various stars, the unsuccessful longitude method, was normally only done in observatories. About the fog, though? Perhaps fog isn't normal at noon at sea when the measurement was made. And having an accurate measurement every few days would be better than never having one until you reached land.--rmhermen
- I was under the impression that measurements of the positions of fixed stars was already the standard method for determining latitude, so would be a quite normal shipboard activity. Would anyone have bothered to measure the height of the sun on a ship prior to finding it useful in determining longitude? Nonetheless, the crux of the matter is that as far as I know the sun is an astronomical object, and I'm confused by the apparent distinction between "measurements of the... sun" and "astronomical measurements". If the sun doesn't count, what does "astronomical measurements" mean? The moon? The planets? Just fixed stars?
- Maybe because measuring the height of the sun was everyday work on a ship while measuring the positions of the moon and various stars, the unsuccessful longitude method, was normally only done in observatories. About the fog, though? Perhaps fog isn't normal at noon at sea when the measurement was made. And having an accurate measurement every few days would be better than never having one until you reached land.--rmhermen
- As far as fog; the article is unclear on whether there was no way at all to measure longitude prior to this particular invention, or no way to do so when encountering fog; the problem is introduced couched in terms of fog reducing visibility, which would obviously also reduce the ability to take "astronomical measures". I would have expected e.g. the rising times of fixed stars at a known latitude to be an obvious way to measure longitude, once you get clocks involved, though of course this wouldn't be doable with fog blocking the stars. Is that the point? Brion VIBBER
The National Maritime Museum/Royal Observatory at Greenwich website refers to the Longitude Prize, with to capital letters like the Nobel Prize. Is this normal? Why did we move it to Longitude prize? --rmhermen
I could go either way, I suppose. It was a unique event, and therefore is something like a title. The operative question is this: will it be used in running text without capitalizing? In other words, would one prefer to write "When Harrison won the longitude prize in..." or would one write "When Harrison won the Longitude Prize in...". If the latter, then it's OK to leave the title capitalized. I think the former reads a little better though. -- Lee Daniel Crocker