On Tue, 27 Oct 2015 15:05:21 -0400, John H.
wrote:

On Tue, 27 Oct 2015 09:25:11 -0400, wrote:

On Tue, 27 Oct 2015 08:23:08 -0400, John H.
wrote:

On Mon, 26 Oct 2015 20:34:15 -0400, wrote:

On Mon, 26 Oct 2015 16:52:26 -0700, Califbill billnews wrote:


Bringing it back.
http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-...025-story.html

I understand at the academy level you want to teach the traditional
course. Would they still want the fleet doing it this "old school"?

Now the question becomes, will they still use the almanacs on paper or
on a small tablet with a calculator? Perhaps they would use something
with a burned ROM so it can't be hacked or corrupted. These days a
small device could carry 100 years of almanac data and be able to do
all the calculations directly from the observations. It could even
have a tutorial and a star finder for guys who get rusty.
That would give you the ease of electronic help and the reliability of
looking at stars.
With the right interface, it could just be a "fill in the blanks"
thing.


Quick, someone call Intel!

My wife has an app on her iPad, 'Star Walk'
(http://vitotechnology.com/star-walk.html), which enables her to identify stars.
Pretty cool.

Android has something similar. You just hold your phone up and it
orients and lays the stars out. The problem is, it is GPS driven so if
GPS was down, it would be down.
OTOH if you knew the time and date, located Polaris and matched the
other stars you could get a rough idea of your longitude. Get the
angular height of Polaris and you get your latitude. (northern
hemisphere)
Using a sextant to hone in on those angles, is basically celestial
navigation

Hers uses an onboard GPS also.

The thing is, the star map is going to be somewhat constant, the GPS
just uses the time and date plus your coordinates to orients it for
you. If you used your sextant to orient the star map, the device could
figure out time and date with a simple "clock chip", you have worked
the problem backward and determined where you are.
I suppose if they really wanted to make a GPS free nav aid, the chip
would be in the sextant but it would look a little different.

It would be interesting to see what is already out there.
Unfortunately, GPS was here by the time the computing power to make a
hand held graphic device like this came along and the GPS will be a
whole lot more accurate than something that you use by sighting a star
or two.
GPS is cheap enough these days to just be an afterthought on a "phone"
(although I am not sure why we call them phones these days)