![]() ![]() Galileo and others reasoned that sailors could use ephemerides, or tables of celestial events and motions, to find their longitude. Longitude-one’s location east or west on the Earth-is hard to determine, and for much of human history sailors routinely were delayed, lost, or shipwrecked for lack of knowing it.Įarly attempts to solve this problem had mixed results. Latitude has always been easy to reckon: Sailors simply note how high or low the sun, moon, and stars are in the sky and use that to determine how far north or south they are. ![]() These lines help travelers locate themselves on the planet. Maps of the Earth are crisscrossed with horizontal lines of latitude and vertical lines of longitude. ![]()
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