NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Re: CelNav without sextants
From: Alexandre Eremenko
Date: 2004 Nov 2, 14:43 -0500
From: Alexandre Eremenko
Date: 2004 Nov 2, 14:43 -0500
Dear Doug, Yes, of course there are many ways to navigate. Dead reckoning, for example, is a good and well; tested method. My question was much more narrow: To what extent can you do CELNAV (Celestial Navigation) without a sextant? And I did not mean variuous instruments RELPACING sextant, like "latitude hooks, staffs, astrolabia etc." So probably it was better to say: "without measuring altitudes". That is by TIMING the events with a correct GMT clock. By reasonable precision I mean precision comparable with what we normally do with our sextants. Few nautical miles in position. In other words, I was proposing the following imaginary experiment: suppose your accidentally dropped your sextant in water:-) But your watch (and a simple radio to check it) and the almanach remain. How well can you do with that? Alex. On Tue, 2 Nov 2004, Royer, Doug wrote: > Define what you mean by "accuracy".