NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Silicon Sea charts
From: W Murfin
Date: 1997 Mar 10, 19:55 EST
From: W Murfin
Date: 1997 Mar 10, 19:55 EST
Charts for upcoming legs of Silicon Sea have been posted at the Ronin ftp site. They can be downloaded by ftp or with a web browser using the URL ftp://ftp.ronin.com/incoming. This is easy to do with Netscape. It automatically displays the graphic file and you may be able to print it directly from Netscape. If you use an ftp program or some other web browser you may need a program to view and print gif coded files. A freeware viewer program for Windows is also available at ftp.ronin.com/incoming under lview.zip. The Silicon Sea chart files are: egypt.gif - approach to Egypt portsaid.gif - Masabb Dumyat to Port Said suez.gif - Suez canal gulfsuez.gif - Gulf of Suez with charted lighthouses redsea1.gif - Red Sea, lat 28N to 25N redsea2.gif - Red Sea, lat 25N to 22N redsea3.gif - Red Sea, lat 22N to 19N, Port Sudan and Jeddah redsea4.gif - Red Sea, lat 19N to 16N redsea5.gif - Red Sea, lat 16N to 13N redsea6.gif - Bab el-Mandeb Strait aden.gif - approach to Aden harbor These are minimal charts with not much more than a coast outline and a lat-long grid. They are all derived from the Map Viewer program at Xerox PARC, http://pubweb.parc.xerox.map, with place names from assorted atlases and encyclopedias. I don't have any access to the detailed information usually found in navigation charts and these might better be called "chartlettes". They are still usefull for providing some geographic orientation for the Silicon Sea cruise and if printed can be used as plotting sheets. For plotting you will need a course plotter or some device for measuring angles. Each chart has part of the latitude scale graduated for measuring distance. You need to construct a scale for measuring longitude but this is easy to do using the method outlined in Bowditch in the emergency navigation section. You can probably get an accuracy of about 2 nautical miles. There is also a Windows program to generate and print position plotting sheets, posplot.zip at ftp://ftp.ronin.com/incoming. These sheets include a compass rose and are specific for each latitude. Even with the occasional jagged line of computer graphics they should allow an accuracy equivalent to universal plotting sheets. Let me know if you have trouble retrieving any of this. Wes Murfin email: wmurfin@XXX.XXX 1409 Cando Pl phone: 910-455-8746 Jacksonville, NC 28540