Celestial Navigation Class?

[HenryC]

I have just retired from my day job with Broward County, Florida, and am now dedicated to living the life of leisure to which I am so quickly becoming accustomed.  I plan to keep busy by increasing my writing (I am now writing a boating column fairly regularly for Florida Wildlife Magazine) and my offer still holds for celestial navigation classes.  If any of you live within commuting distance of Ft. Lauderdale and would like to learn how to use a sextant and navigate the old-fashioned way, I would be delighted to teach you, free of charge. 

I am hoping to develop a celestial navigation course I can offer at local marinas and chandleries, and I can use the practice and some real time experience with real students.  Your only expenses would be to borrow or purchase some simple chart plotting tools, an accurate timepiece, a current Nautical Almanac, and a copy of  Mike Pepperday's "Celestial Navigation with the S-Table" (The latter can be ordered from most marine chandleries or from the internet) and you would need to buy or borrow your own sextant.

These classes would  consist of strictly informal sessions (maybe we could meet at someone's home, eventually meeting at the beach to actually shoot some sights) and would continue until you felt you were able to solo (exactly how long that would take the average student is one of the things I plan to find out by teaching this course).  Send me an email if you're interested and we'll work out the details.

In the meantime, if any of you guys ever need crew, drop me a line.  I'm currently boatless.

[newt]

Henry,
I am humbled by such a generous offer. I need C-nav. If I can find 3 other individuals in Utah that want it, how bout if I fly you out, pay for an economical hotel and  sail with you for a couple of days. If we were to go 3-4 hours a night with our sextants how many days do you need? Finally- do you ski?

[Salty19]

Henry,  This is a very generous offer...unfortunately I'm too far to take you up on it!  Otherwise I would be there in a heartbeat.
Good karma to you for doing this!

[shamblin]

Could you do an onlimer primer? I got as far as noon sunsight, which works pretty good but never made the leap to stars, moon, planets, anything more. Those  $30 plastic, Davis sextants are good enough to learn the basics on, don't you think? I could locate myself within 2-5 miles as I recall.

[HenryC]

Thanks for the kind words, gentlemen, and the offer still stands for anyone willing to commute to the S Florida area..  As far as the generous offer of a free trip to Utah, I'm afraid I'm going to have to pass, Newt.    I don't ski, water or snow, and I'm boycotting the airlines.

Learning celestial is pretty straight forward, the only textbook you really need is the Nautical Almanac, everything you need to learn it from scratch is in there, although not very well organized.  There are also many good books and online resources, too.  Still, it is very useful to have someone who's been there before guide you through it and answer the inevitable questions. 

As for your other comments, gentlemen, yes, I would be happy to do an online seminar on this website if you guys are really up for it.  I'm not quite sure how successful it would be, but I'm willing to try, and it sounds like a suitable project for an unemployed civil servant. I'll wait to hear from the website administrator to help work out the details, and to offer suggestions on just how to carry it out. 

One tactic would be a monthly or weekly essay on CelNav, each essay dealing with one topic, and all of them together constituting a course.  In between articles, you guys could ask questions. and I could attempt to answer them, and there would be an online record of everything.  Of course, there would be no opportunity for hands-on instruction, and you'd have to pick up sextant technique on your own.  (Using a sextant is a skill similar to marksmanship, or photography, it is to a certain extent manual and physical, and difficult to explain over the mail.  But I picked it up from a book, and if I can anyone can.)

Give me some feedback on this and we'll see what we can work out.  In the meantime, for S Florida residents, no matter what happens, my original offer still stands.

[HenryC]

Could you do an onlimer primer? I got as far as noon sunsight, which works pretty good but never made the leap to stars, moon, planets, anything more. Those  $30 plastic, Davis sextants are good enough to learn the basics on, don't you think? I could locate myself within 2-5 miles as I recall.

Yes, a plastic sextant is fine for learning, and not a bad backup in case your main instrument is damaged or lost,either.  An accuracy of several miles is not bad at all for a small boat sailor, no matter what instrument you use,  I highly recommend owning one for that reason, even if you have a more expensive instrument for line duty.

The major problem with plastic sextants is they have very dim images and are of limited usefulness for night work, particularly star sights.  You can make up for this with experience, but it would be tough for a beginner.  OTOH, for the moon, sun, or bright stars and planets, they should do just fine. 

The major advantage of a high quality precision instrument is not that it can shoot more accurately (which it can), but that it can be depended on to repeat that accuracy over years of use, assuming you take good care of the equipment.  The whole point of celestial is not to give you a high precision fix, but to get you close enough to your destination so you can see it.  Even with the best instruments, ideal conditions, and high skills, you are likely to get only (at best) two high precision (< 1/2 mile error) fixes a day, one at sunrise and one at sunset.  Under more realistic weather and sea conditions, you'll be lucky to get one a week.  Once out of sight of land, traditional navigation is mostly a matter of dead reckoning, with an occasional halfway decent fix just to keep you honest.

[shamblin]

I was able to order the Pepperday book used from www.alibris.com

[HenryC]

You can also order Pepperday's "Celestial Navigation with the S-Table"  from Celestaire, Inc

http://www.celestaire.com/

I called yesterday and they have them in stock.  They also carry the 2011 Commercial Edition of the Nautical Almanac, which should be already at the bookstores.  The Commercial Edition is identical in content to the official US Government Edition (It's just a photocopy of the government document with commercials, printed in a smaller format) but it costs considerably less.

I will start placing course units in the "Articles" section of this website.  They will be designated with the title "CelNav N" where N is a number indicating which course unit  (so you guys can print out copies and work on them at your leisure and refer questions to the appropriate unit.).

Keep your eyes open for "CelNav Zero" which will appear in the next few days.  It will give you some idea of the philosophy of the course and introduce some of the theory. The rest of the course will minimize the theory and concentrate on practical applications. It will also give you time to order the materials you will need before the first workshop, "CelNav One", appears a few weeks later.

This will be the first time I do this, and I'm bound to make some mistakes, so please be liberal with your comments and criticisms.  Hopefully, I'll get the bugs out of this process so that the next time I do it I can charge people money for it!  But you guys are going to get it for free, so please bear with me.

This course will use Pepperday, as mentioned above, as a sight reduction method. There are many different sight reduction methods available, the one we will use is Pepperdays.  You can read up on the Pepperday Method and why I prefer it here:

http://www.qmss.com/article/pepperday.html

But don't worry, once you learn how to use one sight reduction method, you can quickly pick up any of the others.

You will also need an accurate timepiece, some nautical charts of your area and the following plotting instruments, available at your local chandlery.

1) Dividers
2) Parallel Rulers
or a nautical protractor, drafting triangles, Breton Plotter, or other method of walking straight lines across a chart while preserving their bearing. I prefer the parallel rulers, but you may already be familiar with one of the others.

Your first homework is to read Steve Ewings's excellent intro to Celestial Navigation

http://www.qmss.com/article/celestial.html

Good Luck.

[shamblin]

Thanks much for doing this.

I remember that the core concept for me was that there is one and only one spot on the earth directly beneath a given heavenly body at a given time. If you look up and the body is directly overhead, you are on that spot.  If you look up and the body is at 80 degrees instead of 90, you are on a circle with the center at the 90degree spot and a size of radius = 10 degrees of earth latitude.

[HenryC]

Right.  That's the GP (Geographical Position) of the body, which we will cover on CelNav One.  BTW, CelNav Zero is now in the "Articles" section.  Enjoy.

[newt]

Thank you Henry for doing this. I think you will have full support from the Moderators....

[Bob23]

Yes, thank you Henry. Wish I could be in Fla. for the class but I'll be closely watching your posts. I have printed several of your writings on this in the past. I'd love to master CN and this will help. Also love to see the Mets win another world series but I'll might be asking for too much.
Bob23

[Salty19]

OK, bringing this back up from the dead.

First, Henry---a million thanks for putting together all the classes.  I'm reading through them now.
Ordered a nautical almanac and a friend has a sextant which I can can borrow for a little while.

I have to admit to being dumb in this area.  I'm good at science, even took a couple of Astronomy classes in college, but wow need to brush up on things. To make things easier I'll probably input the tables for the moon/sun/planets into Excel to make calculations easy.  Excel can be extremely powerful if you know what you're doing.   And it will reinforce how to do the calcs if you program it yourself.

Anyone else getting started or have any success with this? Please share your progress!

[rip]

Jeeze, I don't want to dampen anyone's enthusiasm about this C navigation thing, but i think it is good to consider HenryC's comment:
"Under more realistic weather and sea conditions, you'll be lucky to get one a week."
I never had the patience or brainpower to learn CN on my own. However, In mid 1990's I did sail/motor from Kingston NY to Venezuela, and back via Bermuda.
Having come across a statement like the one quoted above, and recognizing my limited abilities and funds, I decided that I would just be reckless and take my chances with a handheld Garmin GPS. And as you see, I am still here.
Best wishes to those going forward, I might even join you for the exercise. I would like to hear the results of your efforts at some point. Not just from the fine class HenryC is giving, but in your ability to ever really get a good fix from an on the water Com-Pac.

[RCAN]

HenryC

I live in Fort Lauderdale and would like to see if we can work something out for your offer to teach the celestial navigation class.

Lets contact each other.

Robert