Your GPSs are dead, you've lost your sextant and your nautical almanac has mysteriously disappeared. Your VHF and Radio receivers are out too, and all your compasses have failed.
But somehow in the middle of all this carnage and disaster, your laptop is still going strong!
This must be the "willing suspension of disbelief".
BTW - on a serious point, does the potential accuracy depend on the latitude and date?
Surely the correct answer is that you wait 20 minutes (that's why you need the watch) and then, out of nowhere, you'll see (that's used your eyes) a PWC racing passed. All you do is ask him.
I wish I could understand all this astro stuff. One day!
Regards
Joe
PS. Before anyone says anything, I know that PWC drivers never know where they are
Longitude is easy if you have an accurate watch. You just need local noon and compare the time to get longitude at 15 degrees per hour.
Latitude is easy from sun's alt (but not easy to get that without sextant or equivalent), but the bearing at sunset is a great help - if you have the tables or Weirs.
Bearing and time at sunset should give you latitude.
.
I am not a mathematician, but presumably you have in mind something like this:-
The analemma formula could be used to determine the position of the sun as observed at the equator, it effectively allowing you to calculate the figure of 8 the sun would trace in a year (I assume your watch gives you the date as well). Once you fix the position of the sun at the equator then, assuming you could get an accurate angle of the sun at your position everything falls into place, as you can compare this angle to the equator angle, draw the line down as a parallel and obtain the latitude?
The longitude is easy of course, once you have a watch
How would that work? I haven’t bothered to actually work it out, because, frankly, life’s a bit too short and I have better things to do with it.
Any chance that you can run through this in more detail? Or is there a book/website that has what we need to know?
It sounds the sort of thing I should know, given I can't afford a sextant, electronics seem to die as soon as I look at them, and I'm very good at dropping things overboard.
this kept me awake last night
not having yet done any nav other than coastal and not knowing astro nav theory other than being ablt to deduce North and South from the stars ( northern and Hemisphere only)
i assumed that you could calculate by knwing when midday is and when nightfall is you could calcululate where you were. but have no idea whatsoever how you go about calculating it.
isd there a text you can recommend to learn about this?
Come on brain.get this over and i can go back to killing you with beer
If your laptop is working and you could connect to the internet, you could have a look at this site http://www.analemma.com/Pages/framesPage.html
and spend many hours working it out. Should be able to figure it out between sunrise and sunset maybe!!
Okay I see what you mean now. Basically taking two sights by eye at sunset and sunrise. You'd still need some kind of almanac and tables to work out the sights - or precalculated plotting sheet if such a thing exists.
I think your accuracies are still a bit optimisitic though. The cut on the sights will be very bad for an accurate lattitude and refraction corrections for very low altitude sights aren't supposed to be very good.
It is a good method though if you drop the sextant overboard!
Alex Rogers
<A target="_blank" HREF=http://www.YachtsAtSea.com> www.YachtsAtSea.com </A>
It's simpler although the maths involved are more complex.
I'm trying to put together an article on this which will be posted on the BYM furum that will explain it all. I'm currently testing the method with the help of others around the world to see if it works. So far it's accuracy seems to be within 2 miles based on a static position. (6 results so far)