NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Re: Navigation Survey
From: Dan Allen
Date: 2001 May 25, 3:19 PM
From: Dan Allen
Date: 2001 May 25, 3:19 PM
Navigation-L Survey a) Dead Reckoning Rhumb Line & Great Circle via calculator & computer programs b) Sight Reduction Which is your primary Sight reduction method? Computer Program(Name?)--------: s2k, a program of my own creation written in Awk & Perl Calculator(Name?)--------------: s2k, ported to the HP-48 series of calculators c) Plotting How do you do your plotting? Computer Program(Name?)---: fix, a program of my own creation written in C d) Navigation Manuals Name your main reference manual-: many editions of <> by Nathaniel Bowditch; my favorite is the 1966 edition also George Mixter's < > is very good. Name a manual/book that helped you the most-: William F. Buckley's video tape on celestial navigation and his book < > got me started many years ago; W. M. Smart's "Textbook on Spherical Astronomy" along with Lancelot Hogben's "Mathematics for the Million" really got the basic principles lodged in my head; and writing my own software for an almanac and all of the corrections finally made it all come together. e) Do you use the Nautical Almanac? Commercial-: as a check on my own software which is designed to replace the Nautical Almanac USNO-------: f) What instruments do you use? Several sextants (C. Plath, Tamaya, Astra) HP-48 calculators (for calculations, almanac) Seiko perpetual calendar watch (highly accurate quartz crystal for time) Pentel 0.3 mm mechanical pencil (to write data) Clairefontaine 9.5 cm x 14 cm notebook (logbook for sights) Dan Hogan WA6PBY Catalina 27 "GACHA" dhhogan@verimail.com Navigation-L List Owner http://www.wa6pby.com