NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Re: Lost at Sea with a sextant puzzle
From: Alexandre Eremenko
Date: 2019 Jun 23, 05:40 +0000
From: Alexandre Eremenko
Date: 2019 Jun 23, 05:40 +0000
The navigator can find his/her latitude by observing the Sun at noon. The thing to know is the Sun declination, which depends on the day of the year, and this can be approximately found by various simple formulas which "an experienced navigator" may remember. For example: declination=23.45 sin((360365(284+N)), where N is the year of the day (January 1=1). Frank once gave a simplified version of this formula on this list. And of course an experienced navigator has no difficulty with computing sin. Alex.
