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← HistoryWhich outcome commonly resulted when 18th-century navigators misread a sextant's vernier scale?
A)Inverted great circle calculations
B)Significant longitudinal position errors✓
C)Incorrect magnetic declination values
D)Unreliable sidereal time computations
💡 Explanation
An error in sextant angle measurements, which impacts the Lines of Position calculations that determine longitude, occurs due to parallax error during vernier scale reading; this is navigational triangulation. Therefore, a relatively small angular error translates into large position errors rather than other errors because longitude is dependent.
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