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A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
From: Ed Popko
Date: 2023 Jan 26, 07:44 -0800
Sadly, I have become so accustomed to using smartphone apps that I forgot how to use the Nautical Almanac Altitude Correction and Increments and Corrections (v & d) Tables.
So, I took a couple of LL and UL sights the other day to work them long hand with the 2023 Commercial Edition almanac (I gave up waiting for my US Gov Printing Office copy). It took a few passes to remember shortcuts in interpolation, to apply the extra correction to UL sights and get the declination trend sign right when applying the d correction.
There was another lesson here. I dug out old moon sights from my files and repeated the procedure only to find the obvious, moon tables are unique for each year. I couldn't use the 2023 NA tables to correct Hs and Dec for sights taken 10 years ago.
Cold shower aside, the refresh was well worth it. The planets are next.
Lesson learned: apps can make you dumb.
Popko
