General Conventions and Solutions-Their Use in Celestial Navigation

Abstract

It is not realised by many practising navigators and some astronomers who advise navigators on the solution of problems in celestial navigation, that general solutions exist which do not require a list of auxiliary rules governing a change of terrestrial or celestial hemisphere. Before the advent of the calculator, there were good reasons for not using general solutions, mainly because the formulae were not amenable to easy solution by logarithms and tabulation. No such barrier exists today and yet books and articles are still written giving calculator solutions which require the navigator to either memorise or look up rules, when, say, “Latitude and Declination are of the same or opposite name”. This is not to say that solutions by tables, etc. should be discontinued because they are a very necessary backup in the case of a calculator malfunction. This paper outlines a set of conventions and gives examples which illustrate the simplicity and generality of such conventions when solving celestial navigation problems.

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