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Sky and Sextant: Practical Celestial Navigation
Excellent Book
151 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1975
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October 4, 2016
This is an excellent guide to the arcane though still valuable and practical art of celestial navigation. Together with an inexpensive sextant, it was all I needed to learn how to take celestial sights, starting first with the easy ones like the Sun & Moon and brighter planets, then the first and second-order magnitude stars.
Since then I've taken hundreds of fixes on land and sea. I once shot the moon six hours apart and plotted LOPs on the balcony of my smog enshrouded apartment in Beijing using an artificial horizon.
But since I had forgotten to pack the H.O. 249 Sight Reduction Tables needed to work out the sights, I wrote a program in Basic to solve the two hyperbolic equations.
Even with the polluted skies of 1986 Beijing, the sun, moon and occasionally a planet were adequate for fixing my position to within a mile using my plastic Davis sextant, a Seiko watch and my AT&T 6300 computer to run my Basic program. Fun.
Since then I've taken hundreds of fixes on land and sea. I once shot the moon six hours apart and plotted LOPs on the balcony of my smog enshrouded apartment in Beijing using an artificial horizon.
But since I had forgotten to pack the H.O. 249 Sight Reduction Tables needed to work out the sights, I wrote a program in Basic to solve the two hyperbolic equations.
Even with the polluted skies of 1986 Beijing, the sun, moon and occasionally a planet were adequate for fixing my position to within a mile using my plastic Davis sextant, a Seiko watch and my AT&T 6300 computer to run my Basic program. Fun.
Displaying 1 of 1 review