NavList:

Homer,

I am completely new to this web site so I hope I am not breaking any rules etc.  I use Stellarium a lot in maintaining my astro nav practice at home, so much so that I wrote a book about is !  For shooting the sun and moon you can zoom in on the limb you want and read the altitude off the azimuthal grid.  (Keep zooming until you get 1 minute of accuracy.)  You then apply the appropriate corrections as normal so it remains fully realistic.  The key thing is to check that UTC offset is zero (menu / settings / location) just prior to taking your sight. This has a habit of going to the offset for your entered location without you realising.  Because this is a home based exercise, you can choose your vessel's actual position (AP) and enter that into the app.  Then choose your DR position 10 - 20 miles away and use that in you sight reduction pro-forma etc.  When you have completed your sight reduction, your fix will be very very close to the AP if all went well !

Here is a link to my web site showing zooming in on the moon and a fully worked example using Stellarium is attached. https://astronavfromhome.co.uk/Stellarium.html

Stellarium is great, if anyone is windows based, I use Winstars 3.

Cheers,

Andy