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As a landlocked armchair navigator who dreams of one day moving beyond my
little 1 nm wide (at its widest part) man-made lake and out into blue water
where I could do celestial nav. for real, I may be naive, but I am confused
by all this concern over celestial calculators.  Wouldn't regular use of an
'electronic' celestial calculator defeat the whole purpose of celestial
navigation -- a reliable alternative/backup to 'electronics'.  Doing sight
reduction by hand (in both my opinion and the opinion of the ASA Instructor
who certified me) is a volatile skill that needs to be practiced regularly
to be reliable.  What you don't use, you lose... which could be everything
from your copy of HO 249 (or whatever) to doing accurate mental arithmetic.

Is my thinking wrong that the best discipline is that my daily navigation
would consist of doing traditional 'non-electronic' celestial/coastal/DR
navigation to arrive at my position and then check it against the GPS.  With
everything in close agreement, my comfort-level would be such that any
'electronic' outage would not give rise to panic or drastically alter my
navigational routine.

Or is it more realistic that you are busier than a one-armed paperhanger,
and you need all the shortcuts you can get.

-- Joe Shields (lat:40 34, long:80 04)

   

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