NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
From: Eric van der Veen
Date: 2018 Oct 13, 13:21 -0700
On Airborne Celestial Nav Training
Without having an aircraft available it is not so easy nowadays to become proficient at airborne celestial navigation.
So, I decided to program a simulator tool. I created and tested a small PC program in Python that simulates a flight of your design, and outputs sextant readings at custom times. Then it's up to the user to do sight reduction, plotting, adjusting course etcetera. The flight is over when you reach within 10 nm of the destination or run of out fuel, whichever comes first.
The software features sun and star shots, random winds, random cloud cover, sextant errors, pause button :) and a bit more. Although the software has some rough edges, it is functional and I recently conducted a 15-hour (!) simulated flight.
That is a frightfully long flight but hey...... I built in time acceleration,too!
The bad news....I terribly messed up my navigation and didn't make it.
I have attached a PDF that is a report/tutorial of this flight & tool.
Enjoy!
Eric
