NavList:

Paul, quoting George Kaplan:
"In a paper presented at the 1999 U.S. Nautical Almanac Office
Sesquicentennial Symposium, George Kaplan wrote 'If celestial
navigation is to assume a broader role in the modern Navy's high-tech
environment, its limitations will have to be addressed...' "

And he was right. That was fourteen long years ago, when GPS had only recently blown away nearly all other forms of navigation. That was back when GPS receivers were separate, occasionally balky, very expensive devices, and billions of smartphones each equipped with dirt-cheap GPS chipsets weren't even imagined. But his point was spot on, and I think nearly everyone realizes now that celestial navigation still has a place in the navigation puzzle but strictly as an automated system that can bypass those limitations he mentioned. For example, related to the problem of the deflection of the vertical which we just discussed, today it's no problem at all for a device to carry around a detailed gravity model (geoid) and eliminate those few tenths of a minute of arc error that result from the fact that the Earth's equipotential surfaces are not smooth. A model with sufficient detail may occupy many gigabytes of storage. In 1999 that would have been hard to imagine in a practical implementation. But today, it's nothing...

-FER

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