Description
What’s Included?
- An overview of how the celestial bodies in the sky appear to us on earth
- Finding local mean time of solar and lunar phenomena and converting these times to watch time
- Reducing sights of the moon, stars, and planets by the Law of Cosines and Nautical Almanac Sight Reduction methods, along with sight data averaging
- Achieving acceptable 2- and 3-body fixes, using both traditional and electronic tools
- Determining your latitude from a sight on Polaris, the north star
- Provisioning an emergency navigation kit and constructing emergency plotting sheets
- Using navigational software to plan an offshore voyage (Visual Passage Planner 2) and execute a voyage (OpenCPN)
As with the Offshore Navigation course, you will learn to prepare a sight folder that documents your positioning skills using sights taken on the moon, planets and stars. The course will take approximately 10 weeks and, you will have two additional weeks to complete an open book exam.