NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Re: Celestial Navigation as a college course
From: Jeremy C
Date: 2010 Apr 15, 19:15 EDT
From: Jeremy C
Date: 2010 Apr 15, 19:15 EDT
Frank wrote:
"I probably over-stated my case in my first post on this. I don't
object to celestial navigation as the basis for a college course, but I
definitely don't think it should be counted towards fulfilling a "science
requirement" under the normal sense of that in a highly selective liberal arts
college. It's great as an elective topic, and there's a thousand ways you can go
with it. In fact, you're pretty much guaranteed to end up using cel nav only as
the BASIS for the course since, by itself, it's just not meaty enough. You
couldn't teach *just* celestial navigation and fill out a semester length
class."
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I had to laugh at this. Of course he is referencing a liberal
arts school instead of a glorified trade school which is what I consider the
college I attended which was teaching Celnav to actually navigate
ships.
When I went through the Maritime Academy 12+ years ago now, the
standard curriculum for Celnav related courses were 4 full semester classes;
navigational astronomy, spherical trig, and 2 full semesters of problem solving
including everything from LAN observations to ex-meridians and all manner of
moon calculations with the notable exception of lunar
distance.
In addition, the major academic challenge of our last two sea terms
was a practical celestial navigation logbook featuring in the first part;
20 sets of sunlines each consisting of 3 separate observations (each to be
reduced as separate lines and NOT averaged), , 20 azimuths, 5 amplitudes,
10 LAN's (including 2nd estimate time predictions) crossed with AM or PM
sunlines, and 5 each of AM and PM stars (with calculated sunrise/set, civil
and nautical twilights and a selection of precalculated
stars).
For part 2 we had to complete 4 days runs
(the combination in a day of all of the above) for a "C" and 7 or so for an
"A." All were completed on paper with HO 229 tables (due to my
discovery that HO 249 could be used for reduction as well as star
precalculation, it was banned for use in the seaproject This project was
completed in a period of about 45 days of actually being at sea. The
result was that at every conceivable moment we weren't in class we were on the
bridge with a sextant in our hand.
As you can imagine, i can whip out a reduction "form" for sun, star,
planet, and moon in my sleep and can do a full reduction in a matter of minutes,
even if i start "cold."
Despite all of this education and years of actual practice at sea, i
find by reading this list there is so much i don't know about the actual math
and theory of this subject I can't see how a good teacher COULDN'T fill a
semester with this subject.
Jeremy
