NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Re: Mike's Ocean Navigator Discrepancy Solved!
From: Peter Fogg
Date: 2003 Sep 21, 12:12 +1000
From: Peter Fogg
Date: 2003 Sep 21, 12:12 +1000
There could be a wider message here, about just how
difficult it can be to reduce a round of sights without making some sort of
error along the way. My experience is that this tends to be more of an obstacle
to accuracy than the shortcomings of one method over another.
My own solution is to check manual results against those
of an electronic calculator. An obvious advice is: always check the
figures, but its only too easy to perpetuate one's own mistake, as Mike may have
done here before finding the problem.
Another approach, in the other technological direction, is
to have a rough'n'ready quick method to compare more sophisticated results
against. This could be plotting a new DR, or distance and bearing to
destination, as well as calculating it.
----- Original Message -----
From: Mike BurkesSent: Sunday, September 21, 2003 6:41 AMSubject: Mike's Ocean Navigator Discrepancy Solved!Hi folks! My serious fix discrepancy ( about 17 min Latitude North of actual fix) stemmed from reverse sign IC application even though the erroneous fix was closer to DR! I emailed Peter Fogg regarding blunder and decided supplying more detail was "List worthy". Incidentally our fixes were virtually identical! I would hope that subsequent observations ( especially noon and Polaris Lat checks ) would detect the error and the navigator would catch it! Any questions, comments. etc. would be appreciated. Thanks! Mike Burkes
