NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Re: Reliable navigation coordinates of stars
From: Bill Ritchie
Date: 2025 Jun 7, 07:42 -0700
From: Bill Ritchie
Date: 2025 Jun 7, 07:42 -0700
Paul, you say “A good celestial nav approximation might use the mean proper motions of both stars, weighted according to their masses.”
For Rigil Kentaurus and Sirius, Astron uses barycentre proper motion to calculate position. It also uses orbital positions of date and magnitudes to refine this to the photocentre position. I may add Procyon soon.
Please ask if you would like to see my source code. I tried to check my results with Stellarium, but that showed the components diverging perpetually.
Bill.
