NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Re: Role of CN
From: Alexandre Eremenko
Date: 2004 Oct 13, 19:00 -0500
From: Alexandre Eremenko
Date: 2004 Oct 13, 19:00 -0500
Strangely enough, always living far from a sea, and having little oppotrunity to sail or talk to sailing people, I really thought that Celestial Navigation was dead by the end of the 1970-s until I discovered this list:-). The first sign of decline from my point of view was the spread of calculators in 1970-s. One important part of the pleasure, computing with the logarithms, was gone forever. Shortly after that I learned of the artificial satellite navigation (pre-GPS) and it became clear to me that Cel Nav will be dead in few years. Many years later, I saw an ancient sextant in some marine gift shop in California, and was considering buying it, for "sentiomental reasons", but was afraid that my friends will think I am crazy:-) So a discovery of almost 200 people discussing Cel Nav (and even Lunars!!) on the web was really unexpected. (All I knew about lunars was a mentioning in a popular book about Cook and Bougainville that they tested the "method of Lunar distances" of determining longitude. This sentence was enough for me to understand the principle of what they were doing, though i did not realize the complications coming from the Moon shape compression by the refraction. But I thought this was completely forgotten when good and non-expensive chronometers became available.) Alex.