Celestial Navigation

[Attikos]

Good morning, all. I want to learn celestial navigation as a backup to GPS. Being a writer, naturally rather than take a class I want to teach myself with some basic gear and a book.

There are a number of them out there. Since not all books are created equal, my question is this: has any of you found that one or another is a good learning guide for the adventurous sailor who prefers to do it himself?

[thomm225]

There are lots of videos on celestial navigation on youtube if you'd like to get started now while you're still trying to figure out which book to get.

Example:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BWGO...aQU64E&index=3

[estarzinger]

^^ when people say they 'want to learn celestial' . . . . they can mean two quite different things (1) they just want to know a procedure so they can find where they are roughly . . . . but they don't want/need to understand the geometry and math details behind what they are doing, (2) they want to understand the geometric/math details behind what they are doing and not just follow a 'black box' procedure.

those two different objectives suggest two quite different sets of books.

for #1 let me suggest Celestial Navigation for Yachtsmen by Mary Blewitt (Author). It is the classic. There are several others that do an equally competent job - there is a quite good free pdf on the topic here http://iodlabs.ucsd.edu/mrk/Sailing/...rs_GuideV4.pdf

for #2 let me suggest starpath navigation, which has a number of courses and suggested books for learning about celestial.

[Attikos]

I knew you all would know! Thanks, guys.

Thomm, I'll do some searching on YouTube. estarzinger, I'm downloading that PDF now and will read over the reviews on Amazon. I see Blewitt is available for Kindle, and starpath.com looks like a great site to serve as a survey of the topic.

[John_Trusty]

Depends on your learning style. Personally, I never could learn anything by rote as I needed a theoretical 'picture' in my head of the overall structure. For that reason, I chose option #2 described by Ezstarzinger. For celestial, I took a course for about US$400 as the books did not answer my theoretical questions.

You really don't need much "gear" as the sextant measurements are only about 1/6 of the work of celestial navigation. Taking an angular measurement of the body is only the beginning of figuring out where you are.

For a free resource, may I suggest Part 4 of American Practical Navigator (Bowditch), available here: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_A...ical_Navigator

[Stu Jackson]

BOOKS

Every so often folks ask: "What book should I buy to learn electrical stuff about my boat?"

The appropriate answer is: "Depends on how you like to learn."

Go to a chandlery and read a few in person, and start by buying one that you think suits your "level" and is "readable" to you.


I have three or four, Blewitt and Burch among them. Each treats the subject differently. Burch has good info on the instruments, Blewitt only on the calcs.


Good luck, it's fun.

[Bill O]

The Nautical Almanac site is a good source of info.

Will agree w/ J Trusty that learning it from someone who knows how to physically take sights may be better for many. When I learned/helped teach celestial it was many moons ago (more like decades around the Loran C time frame) and there were many more people that used celestial compared to now.

It's still a worthy skill to have and much easier now that there are many spreadsheets/programs to do the sight reductions (thus reducing transcription errors) than when we did the calculations by hand.


Bill O.

[longjonsilver]

i have tried several times using books but i agree with thomm225 in post #2 above that Christopher Nolan's youtube videos are very helpful. Altho i have Davis and Freiburger sextants, i was discouraged but now am watching and rewatching his videos, and am understanding it. i'm so encouraged that i just ordered a nautical almanac.

jon