NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
From: Frank Reed
Date: 2018 Jul 23, 11:13 -0700
Ha ha ha. :) Yeah, a coder might call that a hack --a wild and ridiculous hack.
In addition to the hack included in the attached pdf, you wrote:
"not so easy to remember as the 360° · (φ/360 - int(φ/360))"
And why not remember something even easier: "take the original angle, divide by 360. keep the fractional part. multiply by 360." or in code:
360·frac(φ/360) (but what happens when the argument is less than zero? uh-oh). Yet another algorithm to consider: "place crappy calculator on table. find large rock with minimum mass 10kg. hold large rock 80cm above calculator. drop rock... go online and buy cheap android device with over ten thousand times the computation power of calculator." or in code:
smartphone > 10000·calculator.
All kidding aside, please bear in mind, I like calculators for navigation calculations. They have their place! Get yourself a Casio fx260 solar and then use where appropriate. You can sail the oceans for decades with a solar calculator and a few pages of almanac data and equations (plus sextant and timepiece).
Frank Reed
