NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
From: Brad Morris
Date: 2014 Feb 10, 15:24 -0500
24 characters? A dot representative of the declination of the sun, in other words a graph, for every ~15th day of the year. Combine with a kamal created by various bead lengths to determine latitude. Crude.
24 characters? The most important piece of advice in modern emergency navigation: "STAY PUT. WE'LL FIND YOU". Long gone are the days when you went over the side with your sextant and are expected to navigate anywhere. Staying where you are affords the very best chance of rescue.
24 characters? Frequency of the emergency band monitored by Coast Guard. Or Search & Rescue, etc.
24 characters? "You're kidding me, right?". (Sorry, couldn't resist). I just don't think that 24 characters can contain enough information to do anything in celestial navigation, with results that can otherwise be explained as crude.
Like Tom, I await other clever uses of the 24.
Brad
24 characters - don't forget your iphone - 24 characters including spaces. ; )Interesting idea. Looking foreword to more useful comments.
Tom SultSent from my iPhoneGroup,
Great community. I've searched the message archives pretty heavily for some unconventional ideas during my self-study. I have a new idea that I'd like to try.
I'm customizing a civilian US identification tag ("dog tag") and have 24 characters of additional free space for alternate use.
My question is what information could I put in that space that would be useful (to me) as a tool to emergency navigation? Consider that I have the following available:
* A Kamal -- the "dog tag" itself (two dimensions plus combinations with hole, beaded chain)
* Knowledge of Celestial Navigation
* Knowledge of Emergency Navigation, 2E. by David Burch
-- makeshift equation of time and solar declination (memorized)
-- general knowledge of the other techniques / makeshift rules; would commit any of them to memory again as per your suggestion(s)* Formula for Sight Reduction with a Basic Trig Calculator (memorized)
* Knowledge of Character Encoding giving me the ability to "compress" and "decompress" information into the 24 characters by hand -- in other words, I could condense coordinates, formulas, etc to get more in the small space as necessary to a specified accuracy
* Can identify major navigation stars without aid
* Have access to pen/paper or improvised equivalent
* Landmarks
* _May_ have access to: basic Trig Calculator, LogLog Slide Rule
* _Do not_ have access to: almanac, star charts, maps, or other notes
My first thought was to use it to list several bright stars that are most prominent and familiar to me throughout the year, however given that my ability to reduce sights might be limited and the accuracy of sighting by Kamal, is there something more important to consider? (other than a small adhesive clock/calculator combo)
Or given the limitations, would it perhaps be more important to include reminders of the makeshift formulas I already have (given the diminished capacity for recall under stressful conditions)? Or perhaps reference to bodies/techniques for measurement by Kamal (perhaps even pre-computed for the dog tag dimensions)?
Thanks!
Nick
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