UPDATED
January 11, 2021
Ocean Navigator has produced an excellent celestial navigation series over the years. The latest series is listed below with direct links to the article and a synopsis.
Editor’s note: We’re revisiting this series on navigating by the sun, moon, planets and stars in the age of GPS because celestial nav is not only a viable backup to satellite navigation, but it is also a skill that ocean voyagers should have in their toolkit. In this series, we’ll cover all the basic knowledge you’ll require to get up to speed on this elegant and rewarding technique for finding your way at sea.
Source: Celestial navigation series, part one – Ocean Navigator – July/August 2018
Navigating by celestial is an easy-to-learn, invaluable backup skill. An introduction to celestial navigation.
Source: Celestial navigation series, part two – Ocean Navigator – September/October 2018
In this installment, we’ll discuss how to make our own chart for plotting our celestial navigation data at sea, and we’ll review dead reckoning, plotting, current vectors and compensating for current.
Source: Celestial navigation series, part three – Ocean Navigator – November/December 2018
In this installment, we’ll discuss the navigational astronomy of the sun, the celestial sphere, the coordinate system used on the celestial sphere and also the navigational triangle.
Source: Celestial navigation series, part four – Ocean Navigator – January/February 2019
In this installment, we’ll cover Local Hour Angle (LHA), and determining assumed longitude and assumed latitude. We’ll also look at the spherical trigonometric process for doing sight reduction.
Source: Celestial navigation series, part five – Ocean Navigator – March/April 2019
In this installment, we’ll cover sextants and sight taking, and the corrections you’ll need to apply to your sight.
Source: Celestial navigation series, part six – Ocean Navigator – May/June 2019
In this installment, we’ll cover time, time zones and the Nautical Almanac.
Source: Celestial navigation series, part seven – Ocean Navigator – July/August 2019
In this installment, we’ll cover the HO 249 sight reduction tables and how to plot a line of position (LOP).
Source: Celestial navigation series, part eight – Ocean Navigator – September/October 2019
In this installment, we’ll cover running fixes and the hierarchy of positions from dead reckoning position to multiple simultaneous lines of position fixes.
Source: Celestial navigation series, part nine – Ocean Navigator – November/December 2019
In this installment, we’ll cover how to reduce a star sight and how to use HO 249 Vol. 1 to precalcuate what stars will be available.
Source: Celestial navigation series, part ten- Ocean Navigator – January/February 2020
In this installment, we’ll cover how to reduce a planet sight; we’ll include a step-by-step breakdown of how to reduce star and planet sights, and we will also include a star sight problem to solve as a way to review what you learned in the last installment.
Source: Celestial navigation series, part eleven – Ocean Navigator – March 4, 2020
In this installment, we’ll cover how to reduce a noon sight and also how to get latitude by shooting Polaris, the pole star.
Source: Celestial navigation series, part twelve – Ocean Navigator – April 30, 2020
In this installment, we’ll discover moon sights and how they add a useful celestial body to your arsenal. We will also look at how to use celestial navigation techniques to determine your vessel’s compass deviation.
Recent Comments