April 3 2020 Online Meeting: Longitude and Clocks

Our first full Zoom online meeting is a talk by Prof Giles Hammond of the University of Glasgow on Longitude and Clocks. Joining URL for members to follow. Visitors are very welcome and can watch our meeting LIVE on our YouTube channel.

In this talk we will look at the problem of navigation. While latitude can be measured relatively easily by using the stars or sun, and a sextant, longitude is much harder to measure. The problem stems from the need to measure local time and the time “back home”. In 1714, the British Parliament passed the Longitude act which sought to answer this problem. After several astronomical methods were tried with varied success, the marine chronometer of John Harrison secured a large fraction of the prize. In this talk we will look at navigation basics, the clocks of Harrison and the modern version: GPS

Also at our online meeting:

• Some Society updates

It’s our first real one so bear with us. If you are a member and want to interact with the meeting, please install Zoom on your laptop, desktop or mobile device before the event to make it easier for yourself. Visitors need only visit our YouTube channel.