NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
From: Frank Reed
Date: 2020 Sep 12, 23:16 -0700
You wondered, 'did he forget the refraction correction'?
...It's in there. He says to use the "Stars and Planets" column in the Nautical Almanac's tables. It would be nice if this table could be labeled "refraction" since that's all it is (except for the section which shows year-dependent parallax values for Venus and Mars). But the die was cast decades ago by the designers of the modern Nautical Almanac so we're stuck with it. For navigators coming from other navigation "cultures" (e.g. air navigation traditions or methodologies from other countries), this can be a little puzzling. It's just a refraction table.
Of course he then goes on to detail the laborious Polaris correction tables. Those poorly-designed beasts have discouraged generations of navigators from shooting Polaris for latitude. Such a shame!
Frank Reed
