NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
From: Frank Reed
Date: 2013 Nov 15, 15:24 -0800
Alan, you wrote:
"If you choose to describe celestial navigation as "obsolete nonsense", your call."
Hey, I didn't call it that. I was quoting Nial McInerney. :) Of course, he was probably saying it partly in jest --describing how it must have seemed to those professional mariners aboard the QM2. I do agree that it's obsolete, at least for a vessel like that. It has no place whatsoever on a vessel like that. But of course a subject does not become "nonsense" just for being obsolete. And aboard many vessels, it's still an intriguing option for navigation even if its practical value is small.
And you wrote:
"Strikes me, notwithstanding the availability of other approaches and methods that, as you also noted, "it can still be fascinating science --and good fun". It can serve, respecting ones input, as a worthwhile intellectual exercise too, that being simply my call."
Yes, I agree. But let's be clear: if it's just "good fun" or an "intellectual exercise" then it is no longer navigation, in the literal sense.
-FER
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