Some of us must surely remember working out our astronomical position by Marq St. Hilaire or Longitude by chronometer. It seems long ago as today for less than 200 pounds we can buy a little black box that does it all for you from some measurements from artificial satellites. We argued in those days about whether we would use Nories Tables or the new fangled 'Sight Reduction' tables. We were rather proud at how fast we could work out our star sight at dawn or perhaps our morning or afternoon longitude of the sun. We also seemed to be very proud that all these computations were done in the smallest and neatest figures in our sight reduction book.
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