The ‘Regiments’ of sun and pole star: on declination tables in early modern England
Tóm tắt
Navigation on sea before the advent of exact clocks had to be confined to steering along lines of constant latitude. In order to determine the exact latitudinal position an observation of the sun at midday or the pole star at night was necessary. In case of the sun declination tables were necessary which were computed from astronomical data while in case of the pole star the latitude could be read off an instrument and then needed to be slightly corrected. When England began to rise to a sea power in the sixteenth century literally nothing was known about celestial navigation in England. Hence, Spanish and Portuguese navigators had to be employed and their navigation manuals had to be translated into English. We follow the developments starting from the early translation of Martin Cortés’s book The Arte of Navigation in 1561 until Edward Wright’s masterpiece Certain Errors in Navigation published for the first time in 1599.
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