NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
From: Robin Stuart
Date: 2017 Jan 30, 09:18 -0800
Frank,
You indicated that the Starfinder was a recent copy but might it be the effect of precession operating between whenever the Rude Starfinder was originally made and the present. For navigation we need Equator of Date and so positions in the star Nautical Almanac will change slowly over time. Precession is a rotation about the poles of the Ecliptic of about 1° every 72 years. It will affect the R.A. and declination of different stars differently but it seems like it's in the ballpark.
The thing that I dislike about the Starfinder is that although it offers a quick fix it probably guarantees that the user will never see or learn the sky as a whole with overall arrangement of the constellations that you can use to hop from one star to the next. If the Starfinder had a additional backing plate that was more like a planisphere that would be helpful.
It might also be worth considering alternative projections used to plot the stars on the backing plate,
Regards,
Robin Stuart
