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Greg:

I think the ease of learning celestial nav depends a lot on several
important things:

1.  One's own math skills

2.  The skill of one's instructor (whether it be a person or book)

3.  Reduction sheets, reduction methods, etc.


My early education in celestial was through the United States Power
Squadrons.  They have two really good courses in celestial.  Before
other USPS members chime in, they're recently changed the courses.  The
beginning course used to take one through sun, moon, planet, and star
sights; the more advanced course covered three-body sights, Polaris
shots, and alternate reduction methods.  Making the course more
reflective of the way long-distance recreational sailors navigate afloat
today, the beginning course now requires only sun sights, the advanced
course will pick up moon, planet, and stars.  I don't know if three-body
and Polaris will even be part of the course, but there is talk of having
a super-advanced course that would pick up any of the items bumped.

I'm an engineer by education, so the math didn't faze me.   Actually, I
learned using HO229, so math really wasn't necessary.   But then I
learned of the trig formulae for sight reduction and wrote a program to
check my reductions using them.

I was blessed to have a really great instructor, he knew celestial
inside and out.   So any questions or confusion were dealt with expertly
and not allowed to fester.  I will say that learning from a good
instructor beats learning from just a book -- books don't answer
questions, books don't sense confusion.

One thing that I loved is that my instructor didn't follow the order of
the lessons in the text.  Instead he started with sextant basics --
learning to read the arc, drum, and vernier of the sextant, and
measuring index error.   As soon as he did that, he took the class out
to take their first shots.  He had some experienced help along to help
us reduce our sights.  I can't tell you how thrilled I was to take my
sextant reading, reduce it, and find that my LOP was only 1.5 miles from
my known geographical position.  Wow, this stuff really works!!  That
made me super-motivated to study hard and stick with the material...

USPS also has a great sight reduction sheet that leads you through the
whole process step-by-step.   Just fill in the blanks.  It also includes
things like meridian diagrams, which are a great way to catch gross
errors like having the body on the wrong side of your local meridian.
Again, a lot easier than inventing one's own or, worse, trying to reduce
a sight without a fill-in-the-blanks form to help keep everything straight.

I'm not intending this as a commercial for USPS, but I certainly think
they provide one of the best ways to learn celestial.  Yes, one can
learn it out of a book alone -- but having an experienced instructor
helping you makes it a whole lot easier.

So, whether it was my engineering background or, more likely, a good
instructor, I never had the feeling of "my head is going to explode."
In fact, I think -- and try to tell other people -- that celestial is
really not all that hard, except for being obfuscated by arcane
terminology -- declination instead of latitude, GHA instead of
longitude, etc, etc.

Lu Abel

Greg R. wrote:
> I'm curious to know what your own individual experiences were while
> learning how to do CelNav - was it fairly easy to master, challenging
> (but eventually it made sense and you caught on), difficult the entire
> way, or what exactly?
>
> For myself, working my way through all the theory and practice the first
> time I felt like my head was going to explode several times - but
> eventually the little "Aha!" light bulb came on and it all magically
> fell into place. Was that experience pretty much typical of the rest of
> the people on the list?
>
> --
> Thanks,
> GregR
>
> >

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