NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Re: US Navy and celestial...
From: Lu Abel
Date: 2017 Sep 14, 23:49 +0000
From: Alexandre Eremenko <NoReply_Eremenko@fer3.com>
To: luabel@ymail.com
Sent: Thursday, September 14, 2017 4:30 PM
Subject: [NavList] US Navy and celestial...
From: Lu Abel
Date: 2017 Sep 14, 23:49 +0000
Despite all the recent publicity about the US Naval Academy "resuming" teaching celestial navigation, in the US Navy the officers don't "do" work, they simply supervise enlisted personnel who do the actual work. So it is enlisted personnel holding the specialty of Quartermaster that actually do all the work of navigating, whether keeping a DR plot, taking visual bearings, or taking and reducing celestial sights.
That said, I have a friend who served as a US Navy officer. He said his quartermasters did take occasional sights, as required by their orders to "keep up" their celestial skills. And how good were the sights? "Wildly off."
To your main question, I'll leave it to others with more current experience to say how sights are reduced these days. There are computer based sight reduction programs - such as Stan Klein's Celestial Tools - that are quite comprehensive and quite good. Enter body name, Hs, he, IE, WT and watch error, press the "reduce" button and you instantly get a and Zn....
From: Alexandre Eremenko <NoReply_Eremenko@fer3.com>
To: luabel@ymail.com
Sent: Thursday, September 14, 2017 4:30 PM
Subject: [NavList] US Navy and celestial...
This is frequently mentioned here: > In times when global navigation satellite systems may > be unavailable, due to natural interference, artificial interference, or a > failure or receivers, The Nautical Almanac remains an independent, primary > backup for determining the navigator's position at sea" Almanac remains. But the answers to these questions are unclear to me: How many USNavy officers are sufficiently trained to use CelNav? Do all Navy ships really carry sextants and almanacs? (I doubt it). Alex.
