NavList:

Frank Reed
You gave instructions for viewing your stereoscopic print so that Sirius and Procyon jumped out of the picture.  Well, I’ve stared at it for 15 minutes and can report no success so far.  However, I’ve pasted a copy onto the back of the bathroom door so that I can gaze at it at ease in the hope that one day inspiration will occur. 

You haven’t explained your solution using coastal pilotage techniques diagramatically, because I'm at a loss.  My take is that if the Sirius-Procyon transit remains stationary (as both SHAs move 3°), you must be travelling towards or away from them, and if Orion is on your left, your declination must be increasing southwards, so you’re travelling away from Aries, not towards it.  Then again, I might be completely wrong.

Thankyou for reminding me of the 1 in 60 rule, which I should have remembered, quia multos annos abhinc docui mens mortua computatio apud Schola Navigatoris Spatii.  It simplifies the calculation to distance travelled = 8.6x3/60
=8.6/20 = 0.43 light years. 

However, that should not be a reason for neglecting tangents completely.  My father went to sea aged 15 in 1929 and would have been well acquainted with trigonometry.  I can still remember him teaching me when he came home on leave and I was about 11 “Some people have coal black hair through perpetual brushing”.  In those days in the UK “the perpendicular side" was used in place of “the opposite side” and "the base" was used in place of "the adjacent side".  DaveP