NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Re: Orion at oceannavigator site
From: UNK
Date: 2013 Feb 08, 06:11 -0700
From: UNK
Date: 2013 Feb 08, 06:11 -0700
For what it's worth: I have sailed with David Berson on Schooner Virginia, where he taught a celestial navigation course on the 12 day passage from Bermuda to St. Thomas. This guy knows his stuff! What's more, when he is teaching he is always captivating his audience. When you listen to him you never get the impression that c.n. is a dry subject. There is always a good story and at the end of a lesson you don't even realize how much "dry theory" you have learned.
Trying to put things into perspective from N12 W070 en route from St. Thomas to the Marquesas.
Herbert Prinz
-------- Original Message --------
Subject: [NavList 22278] Re: Orion at oceannavigator site
From: "Frank Reed" <FrankReed@HistoricalAtlas.com>
Date: Thu, February 07, 2013 10:40 am
To: 666@poorherbert.org
Patrick, you wrote:
"The opinion I expressed is ugly and extreme."A little extreme maybe, but opinions are opinions :). The magazine has disappointed you. So be it. Of course if I didn't know better, I would give you an "expert" award for Internet savvy here. You got your opinion out, raw and uncensored, and then you apologized for it --the best of both worlds! :)And you wrote:
"It would have been enough to note that, despite the magazine's title, navigation is not its primary emphasis."As John Karl and Greg Rudzinski have noted, they cover everything else that an "ocean mariner" might worry about. And as John suggested, this is, of course, an equally valid, though distinct, meaning of the word "navigator". A skilled and experienced mariner is a "great navigator". A person who can accurately find latitude and longitude by various various means is a "great navigator". These are the same expressions with distinctly different meanings. Also, there's another aspect to this: the problem of navigation, in the sense of position-finding, is now essentially SOLVED. The smartphones of half the people you meet walking down a street are happily determining position to within a few dozen feet without the slightest intervention or skill on the part of the users. When "Ocean Navigator" was first published, navigation was not yet a settled problem. But things have changed. The very fact that the (clumsy) article on the folklore and mythology of the constellation Orion did not mention any navigational uses of those stars at all highlights the insignificance of celestial navigation today.-FER
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