Celestial Navigation

[Kirk Garner]

I would like to teach myself Celestial Navigation this Winter just as a hobby. There are many 'kits' available online and some include crap sextants for practice. I would appreciate good advice from any who may have already been down this road. Don't want to spend a fortune but would like a solid program with at least a good enough instrument to use as back-up later should the opportunity arise.

As always, many thanks!

Kirk

[Mike and Joanne Stimmler]

Kirk,
I would highly recomend a book to start with, "A Star To Steer Her By", by Edward J  Bergin.

The Anerican Sailing Association (ASA) has an Instructer led course if you want to go that route.

The problem I've found is that there aren't many people certified to teach it.

Good luck
Mike

[Craig Illman]

Kirk - Looks like Starpath Navigation has an online course and they're pretty local.

http://www.starpath.com/celestial/celestial_title.htm

Craig

[Fred Koehlmann]

Hi Kirk,

I know here in Canada the Canadian Power and Sail Squadron have a Navigator course which is basically celestial navigation. They use to have a Junior Navigators course, but it looks like that is discontinued. I would suspect that the US Power and Sail Squadron might have something similar. This sort of thing works out well if you like a classroom setting, where you can bounce your ideas off of someone else.

[Roc]

Yes, the US Sail and Power Squadron organization has celestial navigation.  They have Junior Navigation and Navigation.  Here is the site.  You can find a local squadron in your area.

http://www.usps.org/

[patrice]

Hi
I did start the course with the canadian power/sail squadron, but unfortunatly had to stop.
Fun course, and nice with others to exchange.

But since there is not a lot of people that want to follow this one, they were taking names and once they had enough we had our course.
Actually we were 4.  ;-)

[lazybone]

In the late 80's I had the good fortune to be introduced to William Land, writer, old salt, engineer and an amazing teacher of celestial navigation.
Taught  me, one on one, in his house on weekends.
H.O. 229 method, without a calculator.

never could have done it on my own.