NavList:

Hello,

There are many opinions about the use of electronics for Celestial Navigation. I submit only 2 opposite illustrations:

- Old gaffers may consider that everything must be made by hand and paper, even without quartz time-keeper... But using Lunar Distances through Maskelyne or Borda methods is not so obvious in case of emergency, and paper does not survive in sea water ! (remember Worsley experience on board James Caird ).

- Youngest navigators may consider that Celestial Navigation must be an appli as others, to be downloaded into their smartphone. So not only ephemerids computation but sight reduction and even sun/moon/star sensing have to be integrated into the same device. The human interfaces are only steering the device towards selected celestial targets, giving successive "go" signals, and collecting the result as latitude & longitude. But the accuracy to be expected from the optics of a smartphone is poor to moderate even if calibrated before !

As well, a good compromize for yachting should be to keep sextant and to use low power computers for all the rest. It has been done since the eighties, with x86 small calculators at low clock rate (4-8 MHz). Now, autonomy can really reach several months from lithium batteries.

In professional world, a trend is to combine SatNav and CelNav -with their specific sensors- into the same software & hardware with global algorithmics and error process. The celestial targets should be replaced by assessed land marks for coastal navigation. This is a way to cope with GNSS/GPS outages (due to jamming or any other reason).

Happy New Year to All of you

Yves