NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Re: Celestial navigation: easier basic principle?
From: R William McAllister
Date: 2020 Jan 26, 06:51 -0600
From: R William McAllister
Date: 2020 Jan 26, 06:51 -0600
This is the essence of the long practiced "noon sight," However, rather than a fix at your time of choosing... One shall have to linger on the celestial body to be certain one has noted the precise time of meridian (or zenith if "overhead") passage. The expectation for an overhead oberservation seems a rarity (though I haven't calculated the probability) and when it doesn't pass precisely overhead you might not know if it went by north or south so you're left with a small flat ellipse your within. Also, one must accept all the error from that single data item. Choosing multiple bodies spread in azimuth shall always tend to a better fix.
On Sat, Jan 25, 2020, 10:33 A Ponics <NoReply_Ponics@fer3.com> wrote:
Hello fellow navigators, I am new and therefore very excited about navigation by the stars. My first question is about the stars themselves. Since we have the computer power to know where they will be well into the future why can't we have an easier method to locate longitude and latitude by having our sightings match this knowledge via time and sighting with any of the luminaries when at Zenith let's say or at any angle to my latitude when sighting Polaris let's say? Thanks
