Learning celestial navigation?

[Thomas1985]

Use a trail on your chart plotter while out sailing.

Then take a few celestial and/or line of sight shots and plot your location on the physical chart.

When you get home check to see how close your physical chart points are to your actual location recorded in your chart plotter.

Fun game to play while building skills. When your nav equipment goes down 60 miles offshore isn't when you want to see if you know how to navigate by sky.

[barnakiel]

It is all actually very simple - if you start at the sight taking end.


I will not be claiming one can master celestial nav in a day (this would degrade my old salt bragging rights, eh?). But in a week, easily.


To me, as our boat is so small and dances about so much, it is sight taking that is the challenge, not reducing the sight a LOP.


ymmv
b.

[Andy Johnson]

Where's the challenge at looking at a GPS screen ! Even after taking the sights and calculating my position, I can't help but cast a look at the GPS just to check .... if I worked out the position correctly, I can spend the next hour bragging about it !
Using the Stallarium app or Winstars 3 (now well implemented on iPhone) I keep up my practice with the number crunching at home.
It is still very satisfying to use the stars in amongst all the techno stuff we have on board.