Dear Roger, An intriguing story! Thank you for making this available to us all. What I wondered about: how accurately could longitude be determined around 1600? That problem was tackled only over a century later...
Best regards, Frans Maes Roger Bailey wrote: > > At the BSS meeting in Cambridge this spring. Frank King outlined the > problems assigning a unique date to a mark on a sundial. With our > Gregorian calendar and leap year cycle the date for any given solar > declination can vary over four days. He showed how a calendar based on a > 33 year cycle devised by Omar Khayyam could reduce this spread to 24 > hours. He then pointed out that for one specific longitude, the date of > the first day of spring would always be the same. He mentioned that this > was called God's Longitude and left it for us to figure out where that > was as a homework exercise. > > I've done my homework and discovered a remarkable story, one that just > had to be told at the NASS Conference in Virginia, at the 400th > anniversary of the Jamestown colony of 1607. Fred Sawyer agreed to work > with me as co-author and to present at the conference the story of > "God's Longitude and the Lost Colony of Virginia". It is a great story > of the birth of science in Elizabethan England, the global conflicts of > religion and empires and a secret agenda for the English protestants to > occupy the new world at longitude 77ºW, God's Longitude. > > I have posted the presentation as Fred presented it at this personal > website for you to download and enjoy. > http://www3.telus.net/public/rtbailey/GodsLongitude/ It is a 5.7 MB > PowerPoint presentation. If you do not have PowerPoint, download the > free viewer from Microsoft. This will allow you to view the presentation > but not the speakers notes that go alone with it. > > I would like to thank Frank King for the inspiration, Simon Cassidy for > doing the historical research and uncovering the secret agenda, and > Duncan Steel for publicizing it in his book "Marking Time: The Quest for > the Perfect Calendar". > > Enjoy, > > Roger Bailey > www.walkingshadow.info <http://www.walkingshadow.info> > > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------ > > --------------------------------------------------- > https://lists.uni-koeln.de/mailman/listinfo/sundial > --------------------------------------------------- https://lists.uni-koeln.de/mailman/listinfo/sundial
