Feature Requests

[rgleason]

Dear P_Dub,
Perhaps my "wick" was too. I recently finished fixing Celestial Navigation to work as a managed plugin. It was a real struggle for me as a partial programmer and took a long time with lots of searches and reading. I still don't have one of the environments building without failure, and the android version has some problems too. I still find C++ so different from Pascal...it is a totally different language. So anyway your comment lit my "wick" so to speak.

[P_Dub]

Take a look at Navigator light, that may help you to understand why.
Navigator Software
If that can help you.
Contact me, if you can not get a copy.

[hoolie]

I think you are perhaps demanding too much of Rick. He is not the developer of the celestial nav plug-in and is doing his best to integrate it into the managed plug-in system that is such a huge improvement over what we had before.

I'm sure he would pass constructive suggestions to the developer (Sean AFAIK) but I think you will have to be very specific about what is needed. I don't think just copying what "Navigator" does would be ethical or possible.

There is a long thread that you may not have seen about the Celestial Navigation plug-in here

[P_Dub]

I am not demanding anything; but, I am quite sure that one of you can do something better than what is in the program at the moment. I offer to show and see what someone had done, long time ago. For sure it is more intuitive and easy to use than what you have at the moment. It is not for me but for you. Don't ask me what I can do for you but what you do for you. My time is over and I would have appreciate to have what I have suggested.
So long, bye.

[P_Dub]

Concerning the Celestial Navigation system, I got it to work OK; but, I still think that it would gain in having a star finder including into it. Apologise for it.
Best Regards.

[rgleason]

Pierre, when you say star finder can you give us a little detail for what you mean? I am familiar with a great android app called starfinder that shows the heavens and identifies the stars when the phone is directed up to the sky. Is this what you want in the plugin?

[P_Dub]

Yes that is what I did put in the picture of it. It would be nice to see what one can observe at twilight. And also, it can give you and idea of what to take for observations for those that are still at sea. It can be use with HO 249, if that still exit.
Regards.

[rgleason]

Thanks Pierre, now I understand and get it.
We need to map the star locations to the chart screen with a way to identify the stars and perhaps a way to select a star and see its details.

Anything else?

[P_Dub]

You see if you don't have the HO 249 and or HO 229 (ex HO 214) It is not so easy to find the stars quickly after sunset (for a better horizon) or early in the morning (as soon as the horizon is OK). So with that (as you can see on nav 32), it facilitated the job. This is probably what most seaman have today in addition to the GPS positioning. By the way, how are you doing with the program? After doing many, many sights (stars, sun and the moon) the positions are quite OK like in the book, while in Opencpn you always have to lift the ambuiguity (but that is not difficult). You will probably need help for including this into Celestial plugins. Good luck.
Bye

[mgrouch]

You can try installing stellarium.

[P_Dub]

Sorry my friend, but you don't now what you are talking about. The program I have give you a star finder in colour blue of visible sky till the year 2100 and permit you to calculate the stars, planets, sun and moon. After calculating many sights back till 1958 the accuracy was excllent with precision the same as the sine and cosine fomulae Marq St. Hilaire. So long.
Regards.

[mgrouch]

Stellarium is used to remotely control telescopes can be integrated with GPS and IMU.

[rgleason]

Yes, we have a link to Stellarium Software in the quite comprehensive Celestial_Navigation Manual


I happen to think David's Starpath Navigation which has a number of programs called StarPath would be excellent for our purposes

"SIGHT PLANNER that plots out the full sky in a radar-like view, showing heights and bearings of all bodies, from which you call a BEST SIGHTS function which displays the best triads of sights for that sky. Once sights are in hand, the SIGHT ANALYZER function fits sequences of data to the correct theoretical shape so navigators can identify the best sights of their set. Celestial fixes can be obtained from its plotted LOPs or from computation. StarPilot also includes a versatile “LUNARS” routine for finding GMT from lunar distances. You can analyze present data or historic data from early explorers. The StarPilot internal almanac is accurate from the 16th century until 2100."

The OpenCPN Celestial_Navigation plugin has been created starting in 2012 by the efforts of about 6-7 programmer, including Sean, Pavel (Nohal), Hakan, Stelian42, PovlAbrahamson, who have taken on various tasks over the years. It has been checked and improved by David Burch and me. It does work and has been corrected and tested and improved a number of times. I am sure that it can be improved further if we had some interested programmers.

However I wish this discussion was all in the correct thread that I linked to before. I hope you both will stop posting here in this thread and post in this thread instead. A lot of continuity is lost otherwise!

Celestial Navigation - Cruiser's Forum

Celestial Navigation Manual

[rgleason]

David Burch wrote about Cel_Nav, but added some ChartDownloader improvements that he thought should be considered. I quote him below.

I had noted the chart downloader suggestion in the online wish list at some point, but the idea is simply to include chart numbers and scales. See below attachments.

My ideal order would be chart number, name, scale for the RNC, sorted in direction of increasing scale ( i think that is the order being used now), but the ones shown in the attachments here might be much easier to implement.

For the ENC, we do not need the scale as it is implied in the scale band (2 item of the name)
so this list would be chart number, name.

Resources for the chart number/scale data are at our page www.starpath.com/getcharts, items 12 and 12a. I would guess the chart downloader is using those pages as well.

I think this is fundamental, but clearly not a driving issue for OpenCPN users.

Later he wrote.

I just recalled that there is (what i think is ) a minor bug in recent versions with regard to loading the high res bit maps. It seems to me that all chart location assignments will look into lower folders, ie if we have, say, documents/charts/ENC and documents/charts/RNC, then we can assign Chart files to just documents/charts and it will access both the /ENC folder and the /RNC folder, which are below that level.

But if we also assign a folder documents/charts/GSHHG, then the program will not find the base maps if we just have assignment documents/charts. It won’t reach in there and find them. It seems to me we need to specifically add another assignment, namely, say, documents/charts/GSHHG if we want to access the base maps.

it could be that is required behavior, or maybe i am doing something wrong, but that is what i observe on both Mac and PC sides… but i do not recall which version this behavior started with. Also, now that i know this, it is not a big issue to work around, but it seems to me this is relatively new behavior.

I would like to participate in a discussion about these proposals to understand better what is possible and would be advantageous.

[SaltyPaws1]

The MOB button, when activated, should automatically activate a route, and the range RNG displayed in that route should be a small unit (feet, meters) not NMi. This route should remain active until manually deactivated, even if OpenCPN is shutdown.

Thx.