Re: suggestion for a satisfactory celnav narrative
"As one who has struggled with a plethora of publications that purport to
convey the celnav gospel"
How many books constitute a plethora? <g> More seriously, which books have
you enjoyed? Which did you find less satisfactory? Can you pinpoint any
features that worked or didn't work for you??
" I'd like to suggest a group project of
composing a "minimal" narrative of the essentials of celestial
navigation "
It's feasible but first you have to define: what is the 'minimal' narrative
of celestial navigation? Latitude and longitude by Noon Sun can be taught in
one long afternoon. That's 'minimal' and you can sail around the world using
it (if you're feeling reckless and choose to leave your GPS at home). But
most navigators who learned the art of celestial navigation in the late 20th
century would be repelled by this choice of 'minimal' cel nav because they
learned, what I call, "apex celestial navigation" --the extremely stable set of
celestial navigation tools and ideas that appeared c.1958 and lasted through
the obsolescence of the system four decades later. This "apex celestial" takes
maybe 8 or 10 long afternoons to learn, and it's naturally much more
involved. Do you need that? Does the student sitting next to you need that? And the
one sitting next to him??
Generally speaking, there are a thousand different students with a thousand
different skill-sets and educational backgrounds to bring to bear, and each
of those has different goals, too. For each of them, there is a unique, ideal
'minimal narrative'. Maybe we need an expert system that builds a textbook
based on each student's answers to a dozen questions (I'm serious --that's a
real possibility). In the absence of the perfect text for every student, there
are numerous books that do an excellent job of reaching some large fraction
of celestial navigation student 'population'. Three I can think of:
Howell's "Practical Celestial Navigation"
Whitney and Wright's "Learn to Navigate" (by the tutorial system developed
at Harvard)
Mixter's "Primer of Navigation"
But that's just three out of dozens and dozens of options...
-FER
42.0N 87.7W, or 41.4N 72.1W.
www.HistoricalAtlas.com/lunars
