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A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
HO 211 / Bayless
From: Paul Hirose
Date: 1999 Sep 06, 3:28 PM
From: Paul Hirose
Date: 1999 Sep 06, 3:28 PM
Russell and the group - For use at home I prefer the Ageton Method table in Bowditch over Bayless. The Bayless book is a paperback so it flips shut when you take your hand off it. Another annoyance is that leading digits are omitted when they are the same for several entries in a row. Compare Bayless to Bowditch: Bayless Bowditch 50042 50042 004 50004 49966 49966 928 49928 890 49890 I find the Bowditch format can be read with more speed and certainty. The Bayless rules for negative Hc are incorrect. Finally, the table in Bowditch always has the A value in the left-hand column and B on the right. In addition, all numbers in the A column are boldface. The consistent layout lowers my mental workload noticeably, and is the biggest advantage of the older table. I need all the help I can get! Bayless chose to take advantage of symmetry (A of 10 deg. = B of 80 deg.) by making each column do double duty. This clever trick cut the table size in half, but also made it unavoidable that the A and B columns would periodically swap positions. There are pluses to the Bayless table. The book measures only 9" x 6" x 1/8". I find the table pleasantly clean in appearance, without all the unnecessary dividing lines seen in Bowditch. Bayless includes D.H. Sadler's method for reducing sights with full accuracy when LHA is in the Ageton "danger zone" near 90 or 270. Also included is Elliot Laidlaw's graph for determining your proximity to the danger zone (it's a function of t and dec). Neither of these is available in Bowditch. If I were doing celestial at sea instead of at a desk, I'd probably prefer Bayless for its cheapness, compactness, and robustness (the paper is heavier than that in Bowditch). Original HO 211s are practically a collector's item nowadays. If I owned one I'd be reluctant risk getting it wet. My comparison may be a bunch of moot points. I'm not sure if the current Bowditch has Ageton's table. Another variant on Ageton's method is Mike Pepperday's S-Table. I think Celestaire still sells it. Pepperday has an improvement over both Ageton and Bayless: the table goes all the way to 360 degrees. That means you enter it directly with LHA, instead of having to compute t. The extended range is accomplished with additional column headings; the table is no larger than Bayless. (Of course you can annotate your Ageton table with a pencil to extend its range - that's what I'm doing.) I don't know if Pepperday includes the Sadler and Laidlaw info.