The “Log” of Celestial Navigation

Abstract

Celestial Navigation has acquired a bad name because too many people, as prospective students, think that it is too difficult to understand and too crowded with mathematics of the complex kind. On the contrary, Celestial Navigation should not be hard to master when properly presented and, once it is thoroughly explained in its entirety, it can become a fascinating challenge and a consuming hobby. True enough, during the development period in the 1800’s, Celestial Navigation was complex, difficult for the uninitiated to understand and time-consuming in application. Many people think it is still in that stage and do not realize that shortly after the turn of the century real progress was made toward simplification. Today the practice of Celestial Navigation entails no more than the ability to correctly read and extract figures from tables, enter then in standardized forms and, by simple arithmetic (addition, subtraction, multiplication and division), arrive at an answer which, by plotting, can give the exact location of a ship. A better understanding of these statements can be had, perhaps, if the development of Celestial Navigation is presented in significant details from its earliest days.