NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Re: When did "time sights" fade away?
From: John Huth
Date: 2011 Jul 13, 17:14 -0400
I teach a course where celestial nav. is only one small part of things, so I can't get in details like the intercept method.
From: John Huth
Date: 2011 Jul 13, 17:14 -0400
I teach a course where celestial nav. is only one small part of things, so I can't get in details like the intercept method.
I have the students use a protractor with a straw on the end of it, and a weight hanging down with a string. They get the sun's altitude at different times of the day by centering the shadow of the straw projected on a piece of paper.
The latitude is taken knowing declination and the highest altitude, and longitude from the equal-altitude method. Pretty straightforward and easy to understand.
Just to be a bit more compulsive, we then fit the curve to a parabola and see how much closer the fit gets than eyeballing the curve.
Basically no trig involved at all.
