How sailor going from Venice to Athens in the ancient time knew to navigate EXCTALY to the port location?
I can understand general direction by stars or even a compass but to navigate to a very specific location is other problem as I see it.
I did some foot navigation and to get to a specific point of very different then a general direction and you can’t use just general direction. If you miss your journey even in 0.5 degree you will get in totally other coast and not to the port you aimed for.
It will be even a bigger problem on the ocean travels. The Portuguese ships going to South America. How the know to land exactly at the port of Mexico or other places.
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There are two facts you need to know to place yourself on a globe: latitude and longitude. Latitude is much easier to find. For example, medieval Arab sailors exploring the Indian Ocean would use a board of a known width with a hole drilled in the center through which passed a cord of a known length. They would hold a knot at the end of the cord in their teeth and hold the board such that it lined up with the horizon and pulled the string taught. When certain stars sat just visible over the board they knew they were at the correct latitude for their destination. At that point it was a matter of keeping a constant bearing east or west until they reached the shore. That’s not the most effective way to travel but it worked. A reliable way to fix longitude wouldn’t be invented for several hundred years; with out satellites and computers the only way to know your longitude is by having a highly accurate clock on board and comparing observed sunrise or sunset compared to a table of known data for a given location(how early or late the sunrise is where you are compared to what your table says it should be for your home port tells you how far east or west you are). If you are able to fix both coordinates it is then possible to plot and maintain great circle routes which are the shortest possible distances on a sphere
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