NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Celestial Navigation in the Era of GPS, by George Kaplan USNO
From: Paul Hirose
Date: 2013 Dec 23, 11:45 -0800
From: Paul Hirose
Date: 2013 Dec 23, 11:45 -0800
In a paper presented at the 1999 U.S. Nautical Almanac Office Sesquicentennial Symposium, George Kaplan wrote: "If celestial navigation is to assume a broader role in the modern Navy's high-tech environment, its limitations will have to be addressed: low accuracy (a few miles), limited time window for observations (horizon must be visible), and low data rate. The sparse amount of celestial data collected over the course of a day results from the use of a human (with other duties) as a detector and computer, the small number of target objects (usually just the Sun and bright stars), and restrictions on the sky area used (altitudes 15° to 65° ). It turns out that all of these limitations are a consequence of the way in which celestial navigation is now carried out, rather than being fundamental to the technique. They are a result of the human-intensive observing and computing procedure we use, and in that sense are self-imposed. However, if we are willing to think a bit more broadly about how celestial navigation could be performed, we find that these problems have technical solutions." http://gkaplan.us/content/NewTech.html Several other Kaplan papers on celestial navigation are available in PDF at the USNO site: http://aa.usno.navy.mil/publications/docs/reports.php --