Celestial Navigation

[Gerry]

Does anyone produce a special-purpose calculator pre-programmed with Almanac tables to automate navigation?

 

[alex_rogers]

There are a few available. The most common is the Celesticomp

http://www.celesticomp.com/

All will do the sight reduction for you and the newer one which use graphing calculators as the base machine will plot the position lines so you can throw away suspect sights. Star Path School of Navigation has a web page showing comparisons between all the available calculators :

http://www.starpath.com/catalog/accessories/1874.htm

You can also get software for Palm and Psion organisers.

http://palmcomputing.palmgear.com/palm/product.cfm?prodID=8106

If you don't want the plotting feature, I'd go for a Celesticomp as it appears to be more of a dedicated navigation calculator rather than a program running on a regular scientific calculator.

 

[HaraldS]

It's not very difficult to program a cheap programmable scientific caculator to do that. At least the sun earth system allowing you to do the sun, you can get going way more accurate than you can shoot it, with not a very complicated little program.
I did it for a Sharp 9200 and could mail it to you, it should be easy to tweak to others.
Also , if you have a PC, I have done an Ecel spread sheet that works all the relevant bodies with approximately almanach accuracy.