NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Re: The point of it all
From: Fred Hebard
Date: 2006 Jun 26, 11:03 -0400
From: Fred Hebard
Date: 2006 Jun 26, 11:03 -0400
On Jun 26, 2006, at 10:39 AM, Lu Abel wrote: > What I am trying to do is to provoke some thought. Some on this list > might say celestial navigation is "traditional" and "electronics > free." > > Is that really true when I take a sight, glance at my electronic watch > to get the time, look up body information in my computer-generated > nautical almanac and, eschewing sight reduction using a pocket > calculator, instead do "traditional" sight reduction using > computer-generated tables? > > Lu Abel Lu, The NA and sight reduction tables were generated by hand before electronic computers, and could be again, although perhaps not as detailed as HO229 and HO249. Mechanical chronometers, which were available, more-or-less, with the onset of the NA, also could be used instead of electronic ones, or we could do lunars. Fred
