NavList:

Hi Stan,

See, what I am proposing is decapitating the beast. Take it straight to the top. Introduce hav-Doniol to Her Majesty's Nautical Almanac Office as a wholesale replacement of the tables in the modern Nautical Almanac. Certainly this method is significantly better on every level than the miserable tables which have been published in the Nautical Almanac for thirty years. The argument over whether real celestial navigators (whatever that means) really need them (whatever that means) or whether manual sight reduction is necessary (whatever that means) then becomes moot because HMNAO unquestionably needs such tables to justify their continued funding. If, on the other hand, these tables are simply sold as "yet another sight reduction method" as some adjunct or supplement to other tables, then they have no legs. Without a time machine to get them back to the era when the "market" of practicing navigators could drive practice from the bottom up, new tables languish and disappear. After all, who has even heard of Pepperday's S-tables after all these years apart from hobbyists? I recall that the S-tables were published in the "Commercial Nautical Almanac" for a few years, but they looked like amateurish crap, and they did not inspire confidence. The problem was that they were clearly an "also ran", just some navigation enthusiast's production, and not a professional product. 

If someone does decide to publish this method as a small, separate volume, please, oh please, let the title be "Hav-Doniol, Will Travel".

Frank Reed
Conanicut Island USA