NavList:

I have recently been the beneficiary of Frank's clear style with visual aids. The sundial class in particular had some marvelous illustrative visual helps. I have  also completed Lunars and just did 19th century navigation, and found it illuminating.  An open minded approach to how to obtain simple minded direct results, as found from the tradesmen of the day who did it as part of daily routine. Advanced to today...it made perfect sense.

When I first started celestial navigation I was self taught.  I struggled with reading one sentence at a time in Bowditch about astronomy. Learned a new word like ecliptic or celestial system of coordinates or whatever....tried to remember right ascension from a sidereal hour angle ..... it was intimidating.  I sometimes read and understood one sentance, one paragraph or maybe one page...then reread it agian till the terms became familiar. Once the definitons gain a foothold..text becomes clearer. It takes time.......

The thing that made learning really possible is finding good illustrations or making my own.  I am a visual mind. I must have owned ten books before I found enough written clarity in pictures and clear sentences for dummy me.

Having a background in college math and plane trig  was almost a hinderance.  I was expecting the illustrations to match up to my rusty understanding.  I admit I had to go look up long forgotten spherical trig formulas...but then so many pictures did not make sense.

So many illustrations and texts just say the nav triangle is the latitude, declination, LHA, and altitude.  I'm like how can that be?   finally one of these pictures searched out on google showed the...colatitude, codeclination, coaltitude....LHA...showed the legs in an isometric view.....and then AHA...it stated to make sense.   I admit I rolled cones of paper, drew sketches, searched google images by the hour .....looking for illustrations..looking for clear pictures with clear labels...simple sentences...   

You won't believe how hard I struggled with remembering signs on zenith distance and declinations..etc...so many different statements by different authors......some contradictory or apparently in error..... contrary name, same name, looking north, looking south, eastbound stars, westbound stars, circumpolar stars...min altitudes max altitudes...  the best thing..a clearly drawn few pictures......... Pie illustrations (lol with an equator) Oh gee....its 90 -alt + declination because that slice of pie was taken away on my side of the equator...or - declination because its added in...on the opposite side of equator....aha.... .....one clear picture...I see said the blind man.

 I loved the illustration Frank used in the 19th century class..on our sun latitude...."the way the shadow points"....a visual thing to remember.....  (same type of thing a college professer said in my twenties doing static beam analysis....you cut the beam..it falls down..the the force arrow goes this way to hold it up).

celestial navigation is a 3d art...  I made a taped up 3d cardboard navigation  triangle wedge on one occasion as I contemplated HO 229 and why the tables worked in the different hemispheres.

The sextant is an intimidating looking thing to a newbie....and I was already an engineer....it looks complicated.......   Frank's fixed angle micro "sextant" of a wood block and two mirrors would have been a revelation at that time............I finally realized the sextant wasn't a mystical thing when I picked up the simple davis plastic one used at a consignment shop..... suddenly it made sense... it was a simple device....with a bunch of helpful toys added.  

I would ask questions, even of the supposedly learned folks....and got some just plain failed answers.....the old "we do it this way, well, because we do it this way"...  I need to understand at least at a basic level why....how...somehow...I remember what I understand....I think in pictures, I think in thoughts associated with physical reality..shadows, pies..globes...cardboard models, simplified toys....  my mind is visual more than mathamatical

So....as presentations and teaching come up...and you teach dummies like me.......  the more real physical props and pictures you use, the easier it is to forget I am sometimes intimidated by strange things..pages of unfamiliar numbers, etc..

All this for what it is worth to the teachers among us.....