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A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Re: Formula for calculating a position fix
From: Frank Reed
Date: 2025 Mar 28, 06:56 -0700
From: Frank Reed
Date: 2025 Mar 28, 06:56 -0700
Have you looked at the section in the back of the Nautical Almanac? In just a few pages, they run through nearly everything you might want to code up on a "small" device for a multi-body celestial fix. The algorithm for the fix itself is a statistical analysis, focused on three or more lines of position, but if you just want two —and only two— you can easily pare it back.
Attached here are the pages from the 1994 Nautical Almanac. As far as I know, there have been no changes at all in the math or explanatory text in the thirty-six years since this material was first included in the almanac.
Frank Reed
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