NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
From: Tom Sult
Date: 2013 Mar 19, 08:30 -0500
Tom Sult
Gary,
I would qualify this. Make sure that you have high confidence in those two lines you shoot. I can "feel" when a line is good when I shoot it. I hope that others do as well. I therefore weigh those LOP's much heavier than others. If you shoot 2 LOP's (be them celestial or terrestrial) and you muck one of them up, you can be way off.
I am one of those people who don't know statistics except in the broadest of terms. To compensate for this at sea, I remind myself that the celestial fix is approximate at best, and I know about what error of position I can expect based on the stars I manage to observe and the environmental conditions present at the time.
This same concept flows through my thinking on all fixes. Celestial being the least accurate, followed by visual bearings, then radar ranges, and finally GNSS which can be further subdivided by things such as WAAS, DGPS, or multi-system (L2) receivers.
While I applaud people's efforts to use statistics to boost fix confidence, I am well aware of the limits of precision and accuracy of the various means to determine position.
Jeremy
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