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Dear Frank, Courtney, Jim, and anyone else who cares to read this

>How many books  constitute a plethora?  More seriously, which books have
>you enjoyed?  Which did you find less satisfactory? Can you pinpoint any
>features that worked  or didn't work for you??

For me a plethora of books is over a dozen, and portions of a dozen more.
Specific things that did or did not work out is hard to pinpoint.  I would
come to a point where I was frustrated and throw a book across the room.
What I need for learning is a sort of step by step process to do things.
Once I have the process down and can reference one statement, I should be
able to do fine with my navigation.

Courtney wrote:
>" I'd like to suggest a group project  of
>composing a "minimal" narrative of the essentials of  celestial
>navigation "

Frank wrote:

It's feasible but first you have to define:  what is the 'minimal' narrative
of celestial navigation? Latitude and longitude by Noon Sun can be taught in
one long afternoon. That's 'minimal' and you can sail around the world using
it (if you're feeling reckless and choose to leave your GPS at home). But
most navigators who learned the art of celestial navigation in the late 20th
century would be repelled by this choice of 'minimal' cel nav because they
learned, what I call, "apex celestial navigation"--the extremely stable set
of celestial navigation tools and ideas that appeared c.1958 and lasted
through the obsolescence of the system four decades later.  This "apex
celestial" takes maybe 8 or 10 long afternoons to learn, and it's naturally
much more involved. Do you need that? Does the student sitting next to you
need that? And the one sitting next to him??

My Reply:

For Courtney, I am raising my hand to help with this.  Don't know what I can
do but here is a list of techniques I feel should be in the manual:
Dead Reckoning
Latitude by Noon Sun
Longitude using a shortwave radio and the noon sun
Sextant operation and how to determine the elevation above the horizon of
the sun, moon, star, and planet
Sight reduction using H.O. 249 - method I am presently learning
Sight reduction doing all the math (the "apex of celestial navigation"
according to Frank)

Feel free to add to it as any and all feel necessary.

For Frank, I don't think we are attempting to come up with the definitive
text on Celestial Navigation.  What I envision this being is a simple and
accurate manual explaining what to do where numbers come from etc., and
maybe not so much emphasis on the theory as to why things work, just that
they do work. Again, I will echo Courtney's comments and operate on the
assumption that we are adults and know something about safety.


Frank wrote:

Generally speaking, there are a thousand different students with a thousand
different skill-sets and  educational backgrounds to bring to bear, and each
of those has different goals,  too. For each of them, there is a unique,
ideal 'minimal narrative'. Maybe we need an expert system that builds a
textbook based on each student's answers to a dozen questions (I'm serious
--that's a real possibility). In the absence of the perfect text for every
student, there are numerous books that do an excellent job of reaching some
large fraction of celestial navigation student 'population'. Three I can
think of:
Howell's "Practical Celestial  Navigation"
Whitney and Wright's "Learn to Navigate" (by the tutorial system  developed
at Harvard)
Mixter's "Primer of Navigation"
But that's just  three out of dozens and dozens of options...

My reply:

Yes there are a thousand different students with a thousand different skill
sets, but let's see if we can come up with something simple and easy to use
that is at least a start to wet the whistle of the interested novice and
challenge the expert to help us all.  As to your suggestion of answers to a
dozen different questions, yes I think that is a wonderful idea and should
be put together by those of you who are experts, I am not.  The list of
three texts you have suggested, I will look into to help me with my own
problems, who knows maybe one of those will be a "Holy Grail" and suddenly I
will see the light and all will become clear.

As I said Courtney I am raising my hand to help with this and will attempt
to come up with an outline for some of the problems I am having.  As I get
things written I will post them somewhere (not that far yet) and let all of
you "shred" I mean edit the document.


Andrew

   

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