Sunspots in the eyes of Peary ‘network navigator’

by Wayne Davidson

 Doug Davies is the son of the Admiral of the Foundation for the Advancement of Navigation, backed by National Geographic, dedicated to refute Sir Wally Herbert’s essay printed in their magazine in 1989. But Admiral Thomas Davies passed away, I regrettably missed having this debate with him, I am sure he would have found it stimulating. However Doug turns out to be his son, he decided to criticize my work with refraction, especially because it kills any chance of Peary ‘s North Pole sextant measurements to be true. The first section of his critique fails, as all mean name calling does: “All Cook supporters are crazy” etc, of course this really explains why Peary’s sun measurements were grotesquely impossible. At least his father read more like a gentleman with respect to Dr Cook.

Doug Davies has bad Internet manners as well, like using copyright to claim intellectual ownership of other peoples web sites, even of Cook and Peary’s pictures. And not replying to E-mail’s while using the content of those E-mails for his web page. The man appears to have caught Peary’s very own obsessiveness with control over other people’s thoughts.

Atmospheric refraction at the Poles is a new subject of science, just breaking out, almost 100 years after Cook vs. Peary. To make it simple, consider the sun disk as tires on automobiles. If it is very hot outside the air within the tires expand and the tires look really round, however if it is very cold outside, say -20°C, then the same tires appear and are really flatter. Polar Priorities readers living in Cold winter areas are probably quite aware of this. For similar reasons, the sun disk appears flatter in very cold air, while much rounder in warm air. As explained in past P.P. articles, the science involved is a bit complicated. To make it simple, here is the first proposed rule of sunset science:

“A colder atmosphere always causes significant upward refraction elevation boost accompanied with vertical sun disk shrinkage.” Except for sun disks nearly touching the horizon, the above is a law, unalterable by critics or sextant experts. Peary’s own few measurements of the sun disk vertical dimension alleged to have been taken at the North Pole were shrunken by an average of 10 seconds of arc. This is impossible for many reasons: foremost it is now known that cold air shrinks Peary’s sun disk by at least 40 Arc seconds, that authority is none other than the US Navy, but in reality the sun disk in Peary’s time of much colder atmosphere should have shrank by 60 to 120 arc seconds. Secondly, I use a digital camera and telescope method, which is far more precise than the sextant, it has never given the same vertical sun disk measurement twice. No technique can always give the same vertical sun disk measurement, because the air above is constantly changing from one moment to the next, this phenomenon is not significant enough to be perceived by naked eyes, but any optical instrument can show this.

Figure 2 blow up of Peary’s April 6, 1909 sun from The Foundation’s 1989 Supplemental Report. It very much looks like the sun has a vertical diameter shrunken in excess of 120 Arc Seconds! The vertical diameter appears 12 times smaller than Peary’s measurement. But to confirm this one needs the original pictures. If verified, this picture proves that Peary couldn’t have measured a much rounder sun as he claimed by his sextant measurements.

But there is much more than just compression, Peary actually measured a sun disk larger than the sun disk itself! 32 minutes 10 seconds. This is absolutely impossible. To explain this, Davies used a term called standard deviation, which is essentially an error factor, usually associated with all instrument measurements. For now, this error is 20 arc seconds, for Peary’s sextant it use to be 10 (in 1989), but this changes according to the intensity of challenge. Even with this 20 arc seconds standard deviation, Davies defense of Peary turns sour, having a sun disk average of 31 minutes and 57 seconds (31.95'), is equally absolutely impossible according to all observatories own Earth. But to compound this further, there was never any extensive Polar refraction work in the past, it turns out that refraction in the Polar Regions is much more strong than estimated. Peary’s very measurement of the sun disk confirms that a) didn’t make a sextant measurement at the Pole and b) he fabricated it.

Doug Davies one time explanation: “Peary rounded his sextant numbers” so as to always achieve these impossibilities, was a ridiculous assertion, and it is a good thing he removed this poor defensive stance from his web site. But Davies biggest challenge is for him to come up with a sun disk shrunken at 10" of arc at Peary’s North Pole sun elevation from any sea level location on Earth. Why did the 1989 Foundation for the promotion of the Art of Navigation reported that this 10 arc seconds was “normal”? Is it because up until 1989, it was some sort of scientific theory? Mr Davies also fails to grasp that nowadays, averaging differential refraction readings within one degree segments is now an outdated method, we can compare many shots at exactly the same astronomical elevation in order to analyze the results a little better.

Reading Davies web site shows how well Davies understands refraction and or meteorology, he takes (without permission) a quote from mine: that Cook “observed the sun with about 5 atmospheres [of pressure] and a surface temperature of -31 to -44 F, a great deal of cold air.” the: [of pressure] is an add on from Davies, which demonstrated his incapacity to grasp concepts of distance, as 5 atmospheres of distance, rather than pressure. If he would have corresponded, like a gentleman, he would have been taught of this essential concept in refraction.

Davies then comes up to criticizing Dr Cook’s North Pole measurements. They are to say the least fascinating, nowhere near what 1908 science would have explained, nowhere near a forger from 1911 can possibly imagine. Dr Cook’s sun disk shrank 5 times more than I have ever measured in Resolute Bay. Yet again what was the Atmosphere like above Dr Cook’s expedition? Was the Arctic ocean so frozen with ice thick enough to dramatically cool the atmosphere well beyond present day Arctic ocean ice made much thinner by world wide Global Warming? Or were Dr Cook’s measurements flawed? I don’t say forged, because no self respecting explorer can come up with such outrageous numbers. None more preposterous than seeing the sun when it was 4 degrees below the horizon, but this is possible, and proven*, and yes just as Dr Cook reported on his way to the Pole in 1908. But why didn’t Marvin nor Peary write about the same thing? It is perhaps not a mystery, but a concealment. Peary (like Davies) wanted to be credible; he needed no controversies, seeing the sun when it was well below the horizon was very controversial. A true explorer calls it as it is, a fame seeker calls it as it should be.

Extreme shrinkage of the sun disk is a matter worth investigating, but we must wait for very cold air to make a come back, and perhaps someone will take a few measurements, but for now I suggest coastal Antarctic colleagues to take up the challenge during their early Spring .

But to give a little credit to Davies, he concludes that Peary and Cook are essentially equals in their respective sun measurements at the Pole, which means that neither can be certified without further research. Although, the research with respect to Peary, has been researched many times over, and there is not a chance that he can be vindicated, especially in light of the cover up of Peary’s data (from 1909 to 1989), compared to Cook’s very early information release. Both Peary and Cook were explorers, but Cook was by far the most honest one, especially open for others to explore him, he was an explorers explorer.

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REFERENCES:

Robert E. Peary at the North Pole. A report to the National Geographic Society by the Foundatin for the Promotion of the Art of Navigation. Supplemental Report, 1989.

* = Applied Optics-LP, Volume 42, Issue 3, 379-389 January 2003 Gerrit de Veer’s Ture and Perfect Description of the Novaya Zemlya Effect, 24-27 January 1597 Stebren Y. van der Werf, Gunther P. Konnen, Waldemar H. Lehn, Frits Steenhuisen, Wayne P. S. Davidson

ELECTRONIC REFERENCE: 

www.douglasrdavis.com, My web pages: www.ch2r.com stands for extremely high horizon refraction

Where All Meridians Meet

Cook's Fantastic Trip to the Pole

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by Russell Gibbons

For much of a century (considering that we are just seven years away from the centennial of the beginning of the North Pole controversy) the "mainline" literature that has addressed the rival claims has generally tilted toward a bias for Robert E. Peary, or dismissed both explorers.

Thus it was with some surprise that we encountered the September/October 2002 number of Mercator's World, The Magazine of Maps, Geography and Discovery which has a regular feature department called "Field Notes," and which in this issue featured "Where All Meridians Meet:  Cook's Fantastic Trip to the Pole."

This proved to be a three page summary of Cook’s field notes from “My Attainment of the Pole,” with entries from early April 19, 20 and 21,1908 detailing the final approach and arrival at the Pole. The short preface to the notes is a brief summary of the controversy, fair and dispassionate.

(With one factual error: “Peary, officially recognized by the U.S. Congress in 1911 as the Discoverer of the Pole...” is incorrect. Congress, after the 5-4 recommendation of the Committee on Naval Affairs, removed that designation and gave the “Thanks of Congress for his Arctic Explorations resulting in reaching the North Pole.” The distinction is significant, for many Cook supporters had no objection to Peary’s claim of having reached but not having “discovered” the Pole.)

The subtitle did offer initial qualifications, for