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Re: Kansas: heartland of celestial navigation
From: Gary LaPook
Date: 2015 Oct 29, 04:47 +0000

I bought my first bubble sextant from Celestaire in 1978 and that sextant got me across the Atlantic. I was in Wichita on business and stopped by and met Ken. in the early '90s. I have kept the beautiful catalogs since the beginning, going back to 1978. I met Ken again at the Mystic Seaport in Connecticut at a navigation symposium in 2008 or 2010. Ken also worked for the same aircraft ferry company that I did and he ferried small planes across the Pacific. Ken's a good guy and a real asset to this group.

From: Robert Eno <NoReply_RobertEno@fer3.com>
To: garylapook@pacbell.net
Sent: Wednesday, October 28, 2015 7:17 PM
Subject: [NavList] Re: Kansas: heartland of celestial navigation

I have many fond memories of Celestaire. I started buying stuff from them in the early 1990s and used to look forward to pouring through their catalogue (before the widespread use of internet shopping) and finding ever more neat stuff to add to my collection. I still remember the wonderful feeling of getting a cardboard box from Celestaire and opening it up with exited anticipation. I still have a lot of the gear that I purchased from Ken all those years ago including quite a few books. What a great shop! In addition to being a purveyor of fine nautical instruments, Ken was (and remains) a valuable source of advice and practical information and was always friendly and willing to share his knowledge.

Bravo Zulu to you Ken for providing such a great service to your clients and to the navigation community in general.

Robert

From: NavList@fer3.com [mailto:NavList@fer3.com] On Behalf Of Frank Reed
Sent: October-28-15 1:37 PM
To: enoid{at}northwestel.net
Subject: [NavList] Kansas: heartland of celestial navigation

According to Glynda, "Kansas ... is the name of the star."
You can't go wrong when the "good witch" hooks you up with the celestial sphere!

At a more practical level for navigation, Kansas is the heartland of celestial navigation because Ken Gebhart founded his company Celestaire there, and his company remains one of the world's premier sextant producers and distributors. Kansas is an ideal location, as Ken likes to joke, because it's equidistant from both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. Thanks to the interest in celestial navigation deriving from the recent US Naval Academy news, the Wichita Eagle published a nice article about Ken Gebhart and Celestaire including a neat little video in which Ken explains sextants and the basic principle of celestial and makes an excellent analogy with the game of golf (in the video he also mentions navigation hobbyists... that's you, NavList reader!). Below you'll find the video and also a photo of Ken Gebhart taking aim on us.

Frank Reed
ReedNavigation.com
Conanicut Island USA

PS: The web site, kansas.com, loads very slowly, and is bloated by ads so you may prefer to download the video here (below). The attached video is an mp4 format video file. If you can't play that right away, this is something that you should fix now: install a proper video viewer on your computer. By far the most popular choice is the VLC media player which is excellent for any video. Get it here: http://www.videolan.org/vlc/.

Attached File:

(Kansas-Gebhart-sextant.jpg: Open and save)

Attached File:

(ken-gebhart-sextant-video.mp4: Open and save)

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