3 ms·
This is funny because when I was in school being taught navigation, we were told that celestial navigation would basically tell you where you were half an hour
by HeyLaughingBoy 6y ago
This is funny because when I was in school being taught navigation, we were told that celestial navigation would basically tell you where you were half an hour ago, because doing all the math with trig tables and a slide rule or log tables (forced to learn how to do it without electronic calculators), it would take about 30 minutes to reduce a star sight to a position on Earth surface.
So now we use that algorithm and you've just calculated where the ship was a few hours ago :-)
- dmurray 6y agoIs that really true? Maybe it takes 30 min to calculate from first principles, but I'd expect you could have a book of tables that tells you with just one or two lookups.
- HeyLaughingBoy 6y agoFrom first principles would take a lot longer. 30 minutes is roughly what I remember to reduce about 4 stars. I could be off a bit since it's been a really long time and I forget all the steps, but I remember a lot of table lookups and interpolations to get to a final fix.