NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Re: Celestial nav app for iPhone
From: Lu Abel
Date: 2012 Apr 11, 10:49 -0700
From: Lu Abel
Date: 2012 Apr 11, 10:49 -0700
I have a FREE iPhone app called Sight Calc. It does not have a sky map. It does not provide NA data. But it does do sight reduction, yielding Hc and Z. And it's extremely easy to enter LHA, Lat, and Dec, all in degrees and minutes (and tenths). I've not played with it enough to discover any limitations (like will it work if Lat is 90), but it's simple, convenient, and free.
One of the things I'm discovering as I explore the world of iPhone apps is that there seems to be only a loose correlation between app prices and quality/functionality/ease-of-use. I always look at the app ratings and detailed comments about the app before downloading.
From: Paul Dolkas <paul@dolkas.net>
To: NavList@fer3.com
Sent: Tuesday, April 10, 2012 10:55 PM
Subject: [NavList] Celestial nav app for iPhone
Has anybody had experience with "Celestial" by Navimatics? It's a relatively inexpensive ($15 or so) app for iPhones. Among other features, it has a sky map and will do sight reductions. It's kinda neat in that you can take it with you on your phone wherever you go.I am a little suspicious of the accuracy sight reductions however. Just for fun, I decided to try reducing a set of sightings using it vs. the NA tables. I took about 6 or so sightings on the sun, and then a similar number on the moon. What I was expecting is that the LOP for each set would remain the same (more or less), but instead the LOP offset distance would consistently change with the sun (and moon) elevation. My NA reductions on the other hand had no such trend.$15 for a nav app seems too good to be true - I'm afraid I'm getting what I paid for.-Paul
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