Celestial Navigation
Learn navigation using all the celestial bodies! Use navigational software tools to plan and execute an offshore voyage.
The Celestial Navigation course will teach you how to use the moon, planets, and stars to determine your position at morning and evening twilight to supplement daytime sights on the sun, moon, and bright planets. You will also get access to and use navigational software tools that can be used to plan and execute any voyage.
What's included?
- An overview of how the celestial bodies in the sky appear to us on earth
- Finding the local mean time of solar and lunar phenomena and converting these times to watch time
- Reducing sights of the moon, stars, and planets by the Law of Cosines and Nautical Almanac Sight Reduction methods, along with sight data averaging
- Achieving acceptable 2- and 3-body fixes, using both traditional end electronic tools
- Provisioning an emergency navigation kit and constructing emergency plotting sheets
- Using navigational software to plan an offshore voyage (Visual Passage Planner 2) and execute a voyage (OpenCPN)
As with the Offshore Navigation course, you will learn to prepare a sight folder that documents your positioning skills using sights taken on the moon, planets, and stars. The course will take approximately 10 weeks, and you will have two additional weeks to complete an open book exam.
