NavList:

Alan,

You say: My efforts at "celestial navigation" are likely about as far from actual CN as one can get,amounting to position verification.

Nonesense! Well what's wrong with doing CN this way! It's a perfectly good way to practice, improve your sextant skills and try different sight situations and bodies. And dip short!  Why not. All fair game. How else are your going to check your work but with a known position such as GPS. And BTW, a lot of early land surveying was done this way (without GPS of course). Look at how the US Coast Survey was done in the early 1800s. CN and marine techniques used on land.

And on a slight tangent should you try stars: Greg pointed out, many posts back, that if your sextant has a slight index error in it (either on or off the arc) and you do a round of stars for a three body fix, the only effect the IE will have is to make the cocked hat bigger or smaller than what it might be if you had no IE at all. In other words, the center of the cocked hat, however you want to analyze the triangle's center (and there are more than one way), is unaffected. The center remains the same.

Ed