Digital Sextant Reads our Lat & Long.

Oooh. Sweet. An OId Timer might scoff. The younger Captains today, I imagine, would want to play with the gadget first before turning it over to someone junior;). This is a case where I am all in with technology. In trying to get a fix for practice, I could never get three LOPs even close. The triangle on the chart was big enough to put my fist in – hardly accurate. Our quartermaster was a wiz at working the pubs and doing the magic to get three LOPs to intersect for a near pinpoint fix. I loved seeing the stars at sea. Today’s tech would have allowed me more time to star gaze instead of doing pub crawl interpolations to figure our ship's position.
 
WT Door said:
Oooh. Sweet. An OId Timer might scoff. The younger Captains today, I imagine, would want to play with the gadget first before turning it over to someone junior;). This is a case where I am all in with technology. In trying to get a fix for practice, I could never get three LOPs even close. The triangle on the chart was big enough to put my fist in – hardly accurate. Our quartermaster was a wiz at working the pubs and doing the magic to get three LOPs to intersect for a near pinpoint fix. I loved seeing the stars at sea. Today’s tech would have allowed me more time to star gaze instead of doing pub crawl interpolations to figure our ship's position.
Click to expand...
I mostly sailed Merchant ships...we had to do all the Navigation (no quartermasters). Sun, stars, amplitudes, azimuth, LAN ... all worked. I never could get a Moon LOP to work well. Merchant Officer exams...no forms allowed, have to use HO 229...memorize the sight reduction steps and time diagrams....the 4x8 watch officer would pre-calculate the HS and bearing of starts...draw them on a paper and go out to the wing with the sextant set at the approximate HS...worked well if weather was good.
 
The fact that the price of this wonder is not visible makes me shudder at the possibilities.

As a baby SWO (1160), I had the opportunity (requirement) to do celestial fixes. I'd already learned the "book" side
from USNA celstial Nav courses but now had to actually plan the fix, sight the stars and THEN do the sight reduction
tables, etc. The Chief QM AKA "Shaky Jake" worked with me but my results were mediocre at best. Fixes were not
small, my best was several miles across. Then I came up for orders and went to an Amphib as Navigator with a
brief stop at 3 weeks of Nav school which really did not do much detailed celestial stuff. Once I arrived, my predecessor
who was a former USNA teammate got me started as he had it organized with the Chief doing morning stars and
Nav doing Evening Stars. I set to work and pretty quickly got it down to fairly tight fixes - area of a mile or so. Generally
had a junior QM accompany me to log my readings and mark the time.
.
Best Celestial story? We were anchored out during a port visit in Athens. One duty night, I had a little bit of time and
decided to shoot the stars just for kicks. Didn't have a whole lot of time so only shot two stars. Got called away and spent
an hour or so doing Duty Day stuff but then went back and did the sight reduction and my two LOPs crossed within
our anchor circle on the chart so I was clearly within a couple of hundred yards in terms of absolute accuracy.
.
I own a sextant now - Weems & Plath made out of plastic. The only difference is that you have to adjust it whenever
you take it out of the case as opposed to the brass Navy Sextants that were adjusted every 6 months.
 
I have an Astra IIIB because I am a big nerd, too.
 
I opened the link, imagining a sextant shaped thing with a GPS attached. :)

We had to do celestial shot every quarter in P-3's for proficiency. (I was Atlantic, fairly reliable inertials and Omega, so never that far from land that we needed to do it for real). We'd often do Sun lines while on a transit, then plot them out on the TACCO scope. One time doing a TransLant, I took a shot, and it plotted to within 500 feet of where the aircrafts system said we were. Note, I didn't say 500 feet from where we were...as the aircraft system was usually a little off . (Navigation accuracy is much less important when steaming around at 300 knots than when you are at 15 knots --anything within a mile or so was usually pretty good)
 
I used to have a Weems & Plath professional Sextant...I eventually got a professional Yacht Sextant from Great Britain. 7/8 size ... smaller box. It collects less dust...
 
Also a P-3 FO here. We had to do a star/sun line once every flight just to maintain proficiency. One flight I had to do a nav qual for our new third pilot (also my roommate). We put a round at the o-club on the line on who could shoot the closest sun line. I was off by 3 miles, he was off by one.

Took two weeks before I heard the end of it.
 
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