NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Re: Digital Sextant
From: Trevor Kenchington
Date: 2002 Apr 2, 16:42 -0400
From: Trevor Kenchington
Date: 2002 Apr 2, 16:42 -0400
Dave Weilacher, echoing others, wrote: > I would like an electronic sextant that ... [much snipped] Accepting that anyone can want whatever they want, I just don't understand what is motivating you guys. If you want to know where you are at any moment, to excruciating precision and with no human effort required, get a GPS unit. Better still, hard-wire it to an electronic charting system, radar and autopilot and you can be saved almost all need of thinking or acting. Those who don't trust their GPS receivers can, at a price of a few hundred dollars, mount twin back-up units and have the same degree of security as is deemed sufficient for the Space Shuttle -- though even a single GPS is a lot more reliable in my part of the world than the clear skies without which any kind of sextant is useless. (Those who don't trust the GPS system itself, as distinct from tehir receivers, would be well advised to take all their money and build a bomb-proof shelter to live in. If the whole system shuts down, not knowing where you are would be the least of your problems!) So far as I can see, the point of resorting to a sextant and celestial sights rather than modern technology is to get the satisfaction of exercising a range of complex skills -- skills that in their day were essential to mankind and which remain distinctive abilities of an elite group who have worked at mastering them. If you take the skills away and have some instrument that you just point at a couple of celestial bodies, click a button and read out your position, why not go the whole way and just click the button on your GPS instead? Trevor Kenchington