NavList:

There's an article that was published this week in Popular Mechanics on the future of (mostly automated) celestial navigation: 
https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/research/a36078957/celestial-navigation/

This is apparently subscriber-only content behind a paywall and definitely protected by copyright. I have read the article, and I can summarize it if there's sufficient interest. It's mostly "old news" for regular NavList readers, but with a few details updating it to 2021. The article quotes George Kaplan, one of the world's leading experts on the topic for many decades, who has occasionally posted NavList messages. In fact, I had a certain feeling of déja vu reading this article. Just a month ago, I found an article from 1999 by George Kaplan which I had somehow missed in all these years which hits on many of the topics in this new Pop Mech article. His article from 1999 also covers many of the topics that I have focused on in recent years. Here's the article from 22 years ago: https://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/1999naos.symp..239K.

Both articles mention position fixing by visual (or automated optical) observation of artificial satellites. This is a topic I have been pushing for about fifteen years, and some of you recall I did a brief presentation on this for one of my "Office Hours" sessions a few weeks ago. Maybe the time is finally right to get folks to play along??

Frank Reed
Clockwork Mapping / https://clockwk.com
Conanicut Island USA

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