Longitude at Sea
Edit Page
Report
Scan day: 17 February 2014 UTC
33
Virus safety - good
Description: Describes 17th and 18th century use of eclipses of Jupiter's moons to identify position.
The Galileo Project | Science | Longitude at Sea Until the end of the fifteenth century, sailors navigated with almost daily reference to land. In the Mediterranean it was difficult to go very far astray, and in western and northwest Europe navigation was coastal. Ships hugged the shore from Gibraltar to the Norway and the Baltic. The only exception to this rule was the trade between Scandinavia, Iceland, and occasionally Greenland. These routes were discovered (probably by accident) by the Vikings around 1000 CE. With the Portuguese voyages of discovery, in the fifteenth century, navigation became more difficult. For some time Portuguese sailors hugged the coast of Africa, as they carefully explored the contours of this continent. Both the winds and the currents there made sailing south difficult, however, and beginning with the voyages of Diaz (who rounded the Cape of Good Hope) in 1486, Columbus in 1492, and da Gama in 1498, Spanish and Portuguese sailors sailed the high seas for weeks on end without seeing land. How did they know where they were and whether they were on the right course?
Size: 1108 chars
Contact Information
Email: —
Phone&Fax: —
Address: —
Extended: —
WEBSITE Info
| Page title: | The Galileo Project | Science | Longitude at Sea |
| Keywords: | |
| Description: | |
| IP-address: | 50.16.250.47 |
WHOIS Info
| NS | Name Servers: NS1.RICE.EDU 128.42.209.32 NS2.RICE.EDU 128.42.178.32 |
| WHOIS | |
| Date | activated: 24-Apr-1985 last updated: 17-Aug-2011 expires: 31-Jul-2014 |