NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Navigation program
From: Pierre Brial
Date: 2005 Feb 12, 10:50 +0400
From: Pierre Brial
Date: 2005 Feb 12, 10:50 +0400
Hello Courtney, If you wish to use it at sea, I strongly encourage you to make your navigation program on a calculator instead of a PDA or portable computer. For 2 reasons : toughness and battery life. Calculator are far superior to other computing device for these two features, and it's a pity that nowadays the choice for programmable calculators is so reduced. I have personnaly began to programm a Sharp PC-1262 for navigation purpose. It is the perfect tool for this : easily programmable in Basic, small (the size of an HP-12C), and I don't remember the last time I put batteries in it. Unfortunately this little marvel is no longer sold since 15 years. I think you could obtain interesting results with your TI-82 or HP-28C. It will be a challenge to put a complete navigation program on an HP-97. The main difficulty is to programm the computation of GHA and Dec with enough accuracy. The Celesticomp PC-1270 use 8ko of Basic to do this. At http://home.t-online.de/home/h.umland/planets.zip , there is a javascript from Henning Umland which compute the ephemeris of the Star with accuracy. The source code in java will give you the formulaes. It is readable even if you don't know java. Best regards Pierre Brial
