NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
USNA and Celestial Navigation
From: Kevin Redden
Date: 1999 Oct 23, 6:56 AM
From: Kevin Redden
Date: 1999 Oct 23, 6:56 AM
Geoffrey Kolbe wrote: I read recently that the US Naval Academy has now stopped teaching Celestial Navigation, much to the relief of the cadets who found this to be the hardest subject, along with electrical engineering! Two years ago the USNA in Annapolis made a major change in the way they teach celestial navigation. Unfortunately, the N.Y. Times incorrectly reported that the academy had dropped the teaching of celestial, instead of reporting the change in the way it was taught. While the NY Times article was picked up and republished all over the country, or course the retraction was ignored. What really happened is that the academy caught up to modern times with their celestial program. They still teach celestial navigation theory, as well as how to take sights and how to reduce them. The big change is that they now teach how it is practiced at sea today instead of how it was done in the '60s. Sight reductions are no longer done with tables, paper and pencil (much to the relief of the middies!), but rather by computer! All of the tedious paper work, along with the inevitable errors, are gone. Celestial navigation is indeed alive and well at the Navel Academy, and it has caught up to the '90s. I was down at the academy just three weeks ago discussing this with one of the instructors, so I consider this to have come right from the horses mouth! For those doubters, an easy, but expensive, way to confirm this is to look at the navigation text books used at the academy. "Marine Navigation" third edition by Cmdr. Richard Hobbs, (US Naval Institute, ISBN 0-87021-294-X), was the old book. It covered sight reductions by HO 229, HO 249, Nautical Almanac concise tables (NASR), as well as calculator methods. That 1974 edition was replaced in 1997 by the fourth edition of the same book, updated to cover the new program. It is available for $55.00 from the US Naval Institute (410 295-3754). Regards, Kevin Redden Westfield NJ