Celestial Navigation

[goboatingnow]

Originally Posted by nigel1

What Dave said is the way I have always found a star.
Use the sight reduction tables for stars, work out the approximate LHA for civil twilight, then enter the tables to pick out the altitude and bearing of the star. Set the sextant to that altitude, point it in the right direction, and if the conditions are good, the star will appear in the telescope.
Of course, having a sextant with a star telescope helps.
If you wait until you can actually see the star in the sky and try and bring it down to the horizon, then your close to losing a decent horizon in the darkness.

Is a RYA thing isn't it. Perhaps it's why the English ruled the waves in the days of the sextant !!

Dave

[Celestialsailor]

Originally Posted by Jim Cate

If you are using a computer or navigational calculator for sight reduction, one can simply make a star observation, note the approximate azimuth and enter the time, altitude and azimuth into a star-finder program. This outputs the likely ID for the star, and then you carry on per usual.

My old HP-41 can do this, albeit kinda slowly, and the DOS based one (whose name I have forgotten just now) did it even better. I used this feature a lot when we were using celestial.

Cheers,

Jim

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