NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Celestial Tools V4.7.1
From: Stan K
Date: 2015 Jan 1, 10:42 -0500
From: Stan K
Date: 2015 Jan 1, 10:42 -0500
Attached is a pre-release copy of Celestial Tools V4.7.1, a Windows program designed as an aid to United States Power Squadrons and Canadian Power Squadrons Junior Navigation and Navigation students. As some email programs do not accept executables, zipped or otherwise, when you unzip the attachment you will find the name of the program to be CelestialTools471.exx. Change the exx to exe, then just run the executable. No "installation" is required. However, fonts must be set for 96 dpi (called 100%,
normal, standard, etc., depending on you particular version of Windows).
V4.7.1 is a maintenance release, just exterminating some bugs. V4.7.0, however, added a feature that some might find interesting.
When doing a sight reduction on the Sun, previous versions gave an "accurate" value for the hourly GHA of the Sun (as most similar programs do), which, much of the time, was as much as 0.2' in disagreement with daily pages of the printed Nautical Almanac. This is because, as explained in paragraph 24 on page 261 of the Almanac, "...the Sun's GHA...is deliberately adjusted by up to 0.15' to reduce the error due to ignoring the v-correction." In V4.7.1 there is the new option to use the hourly values of the GHA of the Sun as presented on the daily pages of the Almanac. Using this option, the values will match the daily pages in about 99% of the 8760 possible hours (8784 in a leap year). This 1% discrepancy is serendipitous in that it is consistent with the mandate that Celestial Tools not be "perfect" - it should help the students, not do the work for them. Using the Nautical Almanac value is now the default in the Sight Reduction tool. In the Noon Sight tool, the Nautical Almanac value is now what is used in calculating the time of LAN.
HAPPY NEW YEAR!
Stan
