NavList:

Pub.249 is being published still by Celestaire, including volume I, which is the section that changes every five years. I just completed some editing work assembling this for Celestaire. It's not as if there's no "authority" calculating altitudes and azimuths of the selected stars. This isn't rocket science, no matter what. It's trivial positional astronomy. But there remains an "authoritative" source: you can get all the altitudes and azimuths you might want by hitting this US Naval Observatory web site, which is well-known to many NavList members:
http://aa.usno.navy.mil/data/docs/celnavtable.php

To get data for "249 epoch 2015.0" style usage, set the date to January 1, 2015, set the longitude to 0, the latitude to whatever latitude you want, the UT should be set to yield the desired LHA of Aries (GHA of Aries is the same as LHA of Aries at Greenwich), and then click "Get data". This tool specifically highlights the stars included in Pub.249 by printing their data in blue. The Hc and Zn columns there are the same as in 249. There's one interesting wrinkle which I won't get into right now (of no significance to practical navigation but important if you want to maintain the original meaning of the tables). And that's all there is to it. You hit the USNO web site and grab data for some some thousands of cases and call it a day. :)

For some years, the NGA edition was produced by transferring the British tables into the older Pub.249 format. The NGA will no longer be producing their own PDF, which was an "organic" document in any case (in other words, a royal mess), but I it is my understanding that Ken Gebhart (Celestaire) will be making a screen resolution edition of the new PDF available at no cost very soon, certainly before the end of the year.

-FER

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