NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Re: Compass Rose
From: Nigel Gardner
Date: 2001 Mar 24, 5:45 AM
From: Nigel Gardner
Date: 2001 Mar 24, 5:45 AM
Certainly for general directions just saying 'head SSE' is often all that is needed for say pilotage, I used to sail a boat some years ago that had a rather splendid compass with pelorus, alidade and other fancy gizmos, during the day one had a choice of degrees or points to choose from but at night only the points were illuminated, so if some precise courses were required then the form was to take the courses off the chart in degrees and then convert them by means of Mr Norie's magnificent frontispiece to points. Regarding "N 45 E", "S 20 W", when I used to 'astro' for a living we used to calculate our azimuths in term of the elevated pole and whether the body was East or West of the local meridian. Thus an early morning sun shot in Summer off Australia might have as Z, S123E, this was just as easy to plot as 360 notation and meant one less arithmetical step to go wrong. NG
