NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
From: Robin Stuart
Date: 2022 Aug 23, 08:10 -0700
Bob,
Thanks for you kind remarks.
You say that the talk
...has now set me off to learn how to do stellar occultations.
If you do go down that path then I would advise that you avoid Raper's method which Worsley used. Rather you should look at the much more elegant and efficient Bessel's method which is explained in texts like W.M. Smart's Textbook on Spherical Astronomy https://archive.org/details/textbookonspheri0000smar. It's also explained in the Nautical Almanac https://hdl.handle.net/2027/nyp.33433108133277 with listed the Besselian Elements q0, p', q' for observable occultations.
There are a number websites that compute occultations but as far as I know they are not set up with navigation in mind. For that reason I built this spreadsheet to compute a list of local circumstances from any location and compute longitude from an occultation timing. It is set up for Mystic Seaport, Connecticut but you can enter your own location on the "Control" tab.
Robin Stuart
