NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
From: Robert Eno
Date: 2015 Oct 28, 19:44 -0600
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@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)
