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Celestial Navigation: using the Sight Reduction Tables Pub. No. 249
This manual has grown out of all the courses given by Dominique Prinet, a certified Instructor-Evaluator for Sail Canada who has been teaching celestial navigation since 2000. It has benefitted from the thoughtful contributions of over 100 students. The aim of Celestial Navigation is to give a sufficient grounding in the subject to determine position at sea using a sextant for fixes on the sun, moon, stars and planets. Furthermore, the material presented will prepare a reader who wishes to pursue a Celestial Navigation Certificate through self-study.
The subject requires some comfort with the basic concepts of navigation, but the prospective navigator only needs to know how to add and subtract either times or angles. Lucid and well-paced, Celestial Navigation starts with fundamentals and definitions which ensure that a motivated student need not bring anything more to the table than his or her willingness to master the subject. Richly illustrated, it includes a chapter with more than forty pages of review exercises covering all topics. T
he cleverness of many of the concepts, explained here, will bring about great intellectual joy and satisfaction. Whether you are a recreational sailor or an individual pursuing professional certification as a navigator, Celestial Navigation will teach you what you need to know.
The subject requires some comfort with the basic concepts of navigation, but the prospective navigator only needs to know how to add and subtract either times or angles. Lucid and well-paced, Celestial Navigation starts with fundamentals and definitions which ensure that a motivated student need not bring anything more to the table than his or her willingness to master the subject. Richly illustrated, it includes a chapter with more than forty pages of review exercises covering all topics. T
he cleverness of many of the concepts, explained here, will bring about great intellectual joy and satisfaction. Whether you are a recreational sailor or an individual pursuing professional certification as a navigator, Celestial Navigation will teach you what you need to know.
304 pages, Paperback
First published July 17, 2014
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May 13, 2016
This book taught celestial navigation to me, it can teach it to you too!
The exercises are fantastic for testing what you think you've learned, and cementing it down in your mind. The trick with celnav is meticulous and careful work, holding nothing in your head, but writing down all the details in a systematic way so that when you make a mistake (and you will) you can look back through your work and confirm where it happened. Don't try to shortcut this, or the frustration will be endless!
That said, once the general concepts sink in, you'll discover that the process of doing celnav is actually rather straightforward. Once you've reduced a few sights to lines of position and plotted them, you'll soon come to regard the process as easy, fun, and rewarding.
As adjuncts to the material in this book, I also recommend two videos on sextant adjustment and use, and the celnav process at sea from captain Tom Tursi of the Maryland School of Sailing. His presentation style will illuminate the already well presented material in the book, aid in making it "real" for you, and give you confidence in working this book's exercises.
If I had one negative opinion about the book, it would be with the worksheets the author developed for systematizing the process of recording and reducing a sight. They are very well designed and methodical, yet I found them confusing to actually use. This, I'm convinced, has more to do with my learning style than any true fault of the book. They kept tripping me up however, such that I just developed my own mental flow about how the data was to be gathered and reduced, and then wrote that process down myself into a crib sheet. From there, worked the exercise sights on plain paper, following my crib sheet.
Worksheets for celnav come in many many forms, I've learned. Each navigator tends to have a favorite or develop their own. So don't dismay if the forms developed for this book aren't a good fit for your working style, but in that case do search the web and try someone else's or develop your own. Worksheets guide you through the sight taking and reducing process, much like a checklist for an aviator, and they're just as important to ensuring a proper result. The important thing, whether you use any particular worksheet design or just your memory and blank paper, is to be systematic and write everything down clearly. Label everything if you're using blank paper. Celnav is easy, so long as you can keep track of the data.
If you're a prepper or outdoor naturalist or survivalist, I think you owe it to yourself to learn celestial navigation. While it's clearly most useful in the air or on the water, it can have a potentially lifesaving adjunct role inland (with an artificial horizon)*, especially out on some large expanse of wilderness where landmarks and terrain features are sparse or your charts poor. It's a great thing to know if ever some massive solar storm disables the orbiting satellites that power our easy and ubiquitous GPS system. Should a day like that come, lax mariners and aviators and outdoorsmen will be lost without their Garmin crutch, but you will be better, you'll still know how to confirm your location when they are hopelessly befuddled!
* Lewis and Clark used a sextant and celnav techniques to track their progress and anchor their survey work on their famous expedition across the west, demonstrating clearly that celnav isn't just for salty yachtsmen!
The exercises are fantastic for testing what you think you've learned, and cementing it down in your mind. The trick with celnav is meticulous and careful work, holding nothing in your head, but writing down all the details in a systematic way so that when you make a mistake (and you will) you can look back through your work and confirm where it happened. Don't try to shortcut this, or the frustration will be endless!
That said, once the general concepts sink in, you'll discover that the process of doing celnav is actually rather straightforward. Once you've reduced a few sights to lines of position and plotted them, you'll soon come to regard the process as easy, fun, and rewarding.
As adjuncts to the material in this book, I also recommend two videos on sextant adjustment and use, and the celnav process at sea from captain Tom Tursi of the Maryland School of Sailing. His presentation style will illuminate the already well presented material in the book, aid in making it "real" for you, and give you confidence in working this book's exercises.
If I had one negative opinion about the book, it would be with the worksheets the author developed for systematizing the process of recording and reducing a sight. They are very well designed and methodical, yet I found them confusing to actually use. This, I'm convinced, has more to do with my learning style than any true fault of the book. They kept tripping me up however, such that I just developed my own mental flow about how the data was to be gathered and reduced, and then wrote that process down myself into a crib sheet. From there, worked the exercise sights on plain paper, following my crib sheet.
Worksheets for celnav come in many many forms, I've learned. Each navigator tends to have a favorite or develop their own. So don't dismay if the forms developed for this book aren't a good fit for your working style, but in that case do search the web and try someone else's or develop your own. Worksheets guide you through the sight taking and reducing process, much like a checklist for an aviator, and they're just as important to ensuring a proper result. The important thing, whether you use any particular worksheet design or just your memory and blank paper, is to be systematic and write everything down clearly. Label everything if you're using blank paper. Celnav is easy, so long as you can keep track of the data.
If you're a prepper or outdoor naturalist or survivalist, I think you owe it to yourself to learn celestial navigation. While it's clearly most useful in the air or on the water, it can have a potentially lifesaving adjunct role inland (with an artificial horizon)*, especially out on some large expanse of wilderness where landmarks and terrain features are sparse or your charts poor. It's a great thing to know if ever some massive solar storm disables the orbiting satellites that power our easy and ubiquitous GPS system. Should a day like that come, lax mariners and aviators and outdoorsmen will be lost without their Garmin crutch, but you will be better, you'll still know how to confirm your location when they are hopelessly befuddled!
* Lewis and Clark used a sextant and celnav techniques to track their progress and anchor their survey work on their famous expedition across the west, demonstrating clearly that celnav isn't just for salty yachtsmen!
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