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A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Re: Plotting vs calculating Position
From: Geoffrey Kolbe
Date: 2015 Jul 30, 09:40 +0100
From: Geoffrey Kolbe
Date: 2015 Jul 30, 09:40 +0100
On Wed, Jul 29, 2015 at 8:06 PM, Ron Jones
wrote
When us
ing the Universal Plotting Sheet (UPS) to determinepositionsfrom the intercepts & azimuths of 2 or 3 body celestial observations, the width of the lines plotted on the UPS representing the LOPs can approach or exceed 1 nautical mile.
It would seem obvious that if the scale of your UPS is so large that your position on a chart cannot be determined with adequate accuracy, then a smaller scale UPS should be used.
It is a mistake to try and turn Celestial Navigation into a GPS unit of twenty years ago, which just gave latitude and longitude. GPS units today have scalable maps in them and they show your position on that map. Thus GPS units today are aping what Celestial Navigation has traditionally always done -- show your position on a map or chart -- which gives you a great deal more information than simply a calculated position.
