NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Re: suggestion for a satisfactory celnav narrative
From: Frank Reed CT
Date: 2005 May 31, 22:32 EDT
From: Frank Reed CT
Date: 2005 May 31, 22:32 EDT
"As one who has struggled with a plethora of publications that purport to convey the celnav gospel" 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?? " I'd like to suggest a group project of composing a "minimal" narrative of the essentials of celestial navigation " 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?? 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... -FER 42.0N 87.7W, or 41.4N 72.1W. www.HistoricalAtlas.com/lunars