Celestial Nav with a Sextant- How far off were we? (Part 3 of 6) SV Delos Ep 341
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- Опубліковано 24 вер 2024
- Have you ever hand steered by the stars and fixed your position with a sextant? It's day 3 and Delos is gliding along under perfect conditions. We're hit by a squall under pink silhouetted skies, but it only makes the experience more beautiful. The crew tries hand steering at night by the stars and really begins to understand why sailing can be described as meditative. The next day I break out our sextant and we begin by taking a series of sightings with one purpose- see just how close we can get to our actual GPS position using old navigation techniques that are centuries old. Guess how far off we were?
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I really wanted to name this video "I can see Uranus with my Sextant" but got voted down. Who's with me????
🙋♂️😂🤣😂
With such a beautiful Crew, you kinda set yourself up, self inflicted so to speak. Cost/Benefit. You made a great choice, and thanks for that. 🤠 ☀️ 💨 ⛵️ 🙏 ⚓️ 😘
you would see a massive increase in views pretty quick ,I vote yes from Newfie Barnacle Bill
Long ago, my brother and I were interested in astronomy and I had just read that rings had been discovered around the seventh planet by an airborne observatory. "Hey, Stew, they discovered rings around Uranus!" Without missing a beat, he looked over his shoulder and vamped, "Really?!"
We lost him to AIDS in '94, I still miss him.
The Starship Enterprise and toilet paper. They both circle Uranis looking for Klingons
I am Jade’s grandma. Thank you so much for giving her the opportunity to sail and learn. It is truly an awesome adventure.
Hi Grandma!
Hi Grandma, welcome to the family.
Hi Jade’s Grandma!
Hi Bill. Jade owns a sailboat...what a great life.
Now we see where she got her intellect and good looks..
Its a Gene pool thing Grandma..
Hope you have an opportunity to sail with her in near future...
If Brian was my teacher in school, I would have gotten much better grades, unless Taylor was also in the class, then forget all that.
LOL so true
Oh... smack. I'm not sure 'smack' is relevant anymore. With respect to Sailor Taylor though, that was funny.
HAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAH
As apprentice officer on a container boat in 1978 I also did shoot the stars and the sun. I was the proud owner of an HP programmable digital pocket calculator. The second mate did the same calculations with the good old logarithmic tables. He then berated me that his position and my position were more than one mile separated and that an error of more than half a mile was not allowed because that could be the difference of being on the rocks or inside deep water. I then started to investigate where that difference came from. He used logarithmic table with 5 digits. I used digital calculation with 13 digits. So I sat down and calculate each step of my digital program on 5 digits. The result was that I ended up with the same position as the second mate. So my conclusion was that we had a different position because in our case the accuracy of the logarithmic tables was not enough. He was not amused to learn that with all his good intentions to convince me about the importance of accurate positions he ended up with the situation that he was the one with the wrong position. By then the GPS was still largely classified so that we got out of the 12" rack computer with LED display a position accurate to 200 m. That was a little bit less then the size of the boat.
And now we have this information in the palm of our hands. Wild!
Paul, very interesting. See my posts about the celestial nav class I took years ago.
The sextant lesson was really cool!! It´s so nice that you combine education stuff with a sailing vlog - that really teaches all of us something, way to go!
I have to say thank you so much for adding the Night Time Sky shots in this one, truly stunning. I'm happy to hear the crossing is going so well and that things are so enjoyable. Beautiful Vessel, crew and family living their best lives, truly awesome.
Fair winds, following seas, safe travels and God Bless...
I love how this episode is focused on the sky, from downpouring rain to hand steer with the shooting stars! Then the little tutorial of the sextant was wonderful. I guess my favorite episode for a while now :)
Brian's a natural born leader. Great vibe you guys have going on passage!
Brian you lucky dog. Beautiful sailing weather, beautiful crew and a wife we all love. I really like seeing the interaction with the crew.Love to Nuggs and fair winds for Kaz.
Credit to Brian he earned it
this is why delos is at the top of the tree, in sailing circles, many modern sailors would not have a clue how to do this and if the gps network failed would have no clue where the next reef or rock lie . They mostly say oh i have 3,4, or 5 gps devices but that does not matter if there is no gps signal maybe just maybe with brians credibility in the sailing community, many will see how important a backup of celestial navigation is when the shit goes down . Well done brian you have really earned your position in the utube community much respect
Always have a plan A, B & C. Possibly even a E.
Great video Brian. You’re teaching the next generation important components about Delos and navigation. I can tell you have the heart of a teacher. Great job. Cheers and blessings for safe passage with your all lady crew. Nice to be along 👍🇺🇸😎...
How can you guys not have over 1 million subscribers? I still can't believe it. I've been watching you guys for 7 years and love following your family & friends every week. I look forward to the moment you guys hit the 1 million subscribers. Keep you doing what you guys doing, it's absolutely amazing 👏 👌 ❤🙏✌
One of the good things I remember from my deployments to Afghanistan was being down range in the middle of the night with no light pollution and just staring up into the night sky and see the beauty of the universe.
I can imagine.........
I spent 6 years on a submarine in the North Atlantic. We got to surface a few times at night...and I got to go topside with no lights on anywhere...I know what you mean....amazing.
TL:DR; Yea, if you would do me (or us, really, as i hope i speak for everyone reading this comment) a favor and look up a youtube video called "night sky milkyway no light pollution" and tell me, from your first-hand experience, which one of these "light levels" did you witness?
I'm assuming the ocean will account for a decent amount of light pollution still, despite not having any artificial light sources within the horizon, but you can't really get a good idea of what exactly this is like to watch with the human eye, from a picture. Cameras don't work the same way as our eyes, particularly regarding light-levels and so its really hard to know which "real" pictures are actually representative of a really clear night sky on the open ocean - to the human eye.
I am quite curious about this, as I do some amateur stargazing myself... or try to, with all the light pollution I have to deal with.
@@sandercohen5543 Level 1 was what I remember from my time in the Tora Bora region.
@@mysterymayhem7020 Goddammit, now i guess i'll have to sell my house and buy my very own floating observatory ;)
I'm a professional mariner. 1600ton master and unlimited tonnage second mate. I gotta say Brian, you run a tight ship. even giving those ladies a little grief for showing up late to watch. watch standing is a big responsibility and should not be taken lightly. if you cant make it on time it becomes hard to trust your ability to stand the watch at all. Nice to see you keeping the art of celestial navigation alive. by taking a sight of the sun at its highest point in the sky (also called its zenith) you are determining LAN or local apparent noon which in conjunction with a precise reading of GMT and your local hour angle based on your longitude can be used to determine position. Well done
Im binging and a tear fell down my cheek watching Brian guide Jaecee in her first ever night hand steering by following the stars. The genuine smile and amazement she showed made me so happy. Wow Brian you are so amazing letting the things you learned pass on to others. Even here on the channel. I am from sweden, just about to buy my own boat to fix upp and finally go on my first passage. Much thanks to the delos crew. All love!
5 seconds into this episode, and I agree that's a pretty amazing start.
24:29 Sierra's weapon is her cuteness, unbeatable.
So true.
Bryan as smart as you are with all of your electronic and mechanical wizardry, I’m glad you started to learn celestial navigation. I understand they put it back on the curriculum at the Naval Academy. Guess there is some concern that they can’t always take satellite navigation for granted. Smart move.
In the event of all out cyber war...
My one victory.
I had a cheap Chinese brass/bronze sextant when I cruised. It was a backup in case GPS went down. If I took several sights every day eventually I got pretty consistent and somewhat accurate. Small cocked hats for those in the know.
Smart move for sure, even with GPS, RADAR, and HUMINT the Navy's track record over the last few years has had more than a few ACTUAL bumps in the night. (full disclosure: ex-Navy EM3, honorable disch, loved every minute of it.)
I would place a wager he was familiar with it... but like most people today we rely so much on electronics. I never knew that it was withdrawn from the Naval Academy though. I wonder when that happened? My daughter was at Annapolis, but a long time ago. It was always a required course I thought. Anyway, yes, it's an important course.
The sheer joy of steering by the stars was so obvious. Amazing.
One of the best sailing channel for the scientific information provided .. keep the good work and have plenty of fun
Personally this was the best one yet, I'm very numbers oriented, distances, torques, speed etc. What a tutorial, serious stuff there.
Been looking for sailing content like this, connecting astronomy and science to sailing. Thanks people.
Rigging Doctor/Sailing Wisdom has a bunch of "science of sailing"-like videos, he also crossed the Atl. from Cape Verde to Suriname using a sextant, while Maddie privately confirmed their actual location via GPS.
Have you read the book, “Longitude” by Dava Sobel? A fun read. The original ‘X Prize’. John Harrison’s clocks are still ticking in the Greenwich Observatory. I visited there after reading the book and spent most of my time there hanging with the clocks!
Try Umberto Eco's novel _The Island of the Day Before._
Great book!
I think the book was actually seen in a Delos episode a few years ago. I believe Blue was reading it on the way from Brazil to Grenada...
"Longitude" is an excellent read. Highly recommended!
Me too!
I was in Thetford England for work and HAD to see the clocks. So a colleague and I took two trains and two subway lines to Greenwhich. Believing the clocks were still in the Maritime Museum at the bottom of the hill we headed there only to find out they had been moved to the Observatory at the top of the hill and advised that it will close in 7 minutes. We ran up the hill only to miss it buy a minute or two. I was so upset. There is a great 3 hour movie of the story on UA-cam.
Nice one to the Team SV Delos, Wish you all the Safety of Rough SEAS...
A little late, but I like like it! (I like it a lot!) : - ) It's 10:30 pm here so I'll have to add more tomorrow. But first, I must say that it was the best ever to meet ALL of you at the 2021 US Sailboat Show in Annapolis, MD! My Delos Tribe flag is looking good!
SV Delos illuminates the beauty of sailing. What an experience.
Always a pleasure. Keeps me calm at work!
The theme song still brings all the good memories of the Delos tribe..
Yeah they cut out the original theme song but evidently brought itback due to popular demand... thank goodness. now if someone would just let it play through! It fades out just when I'm beginning to float away.
@@Sommers234 The full version is available on YT, so you can float whenever the mood strikes. :) Actually there was an updated take on it as well, which is pretty magical.
Just came across you all a day ago while recovering from covid. After watching a couple episodes I felt like that feeling of being on a boat in my body as I was drifting off to sleep. Today I learned about the sextant from watching. Enjoy your adventures y’all!!!!
Sincerely,
Hero
You should go back and start at the beginning. Well worth the binge.
I had great fun teaching my son's 4th grade class on how to use a sextant. Learning that skill helps us understand the relationships and movements of celestial bodies. With a tray of water one can also use a sextant on land as was done on the Lewis and Clark expedition.
I like you brought out your sextant. As a professional navigator I would say to only do Latitude from LAN. Secondly I would take sunlines at least and hour apart and not during noon because as the sun gets closer to the horizon the angles between the lines are bigger. So a more accurate fix. If I was on the forenoon watch I would take 3 in the morning an hour apart and take LAN depending on where I am in the time zone. Then reduce and advance each line to the time at LAN. It’s a lot of information for beginners but as you learn the skill this will make sense. Using a sextant is still one of the best things I learned. If your under 5 miles on a bouncy day that’s great. On a flat day. Being under a mile is perfection. Great video I hope y’all continue to learn celestial.
I would give anything to experience sailing (like Delos is doing right now) but I never will .... Pushing 81 and my time is near. I'd love to see the night sky like I used too as a kid .... All the stars and we are part of the system.
Is there anyone who can drive you to a place with low city light pollution? Something spirit refreshing about a night sky showing stars to the horizon. Stays with you for days.
I grew up in north east Ohio, lots of water and light pollution. Went to college in Idaho, almost no moisture or light pollution. Laid down and looked at that beautiful milkyway & sky. Was simply awed.
When it's time, may your passing be gentle sir. God bless.
It's a lovely dream but if you're willing to give some money you can make it a reality. There are endless Charter companies out there that would be happy to fill your wishes
One of the better real world explanations of a sextant...who said you won't learn something on a Friday? Thanks Brian and crew!
Wonderful days & Sea Adventures 🥰love to sail🥰
The crew of Delos is sooo cheeky (boldly rude, impudent, or disrespectful in usually a playful or appealing way)
Great episode and nice training on the poor man’s GPS. This was an excellent lesson.
Let it suffice to say from watching your latest sailing adventure that having a bubbly, nearly always smiling and laughing crew mate like the adorable Nugget on board, how could any day be anything less than Shangri-La.
The view of the night sky on the open sea miles from the nearest artificial light must be spectacular. What is even more interesting is the stars can be and were used for navigation for millenia before the invention of the magnetic compass or the sextant.
Yes, it is!!
Very cool that you're doing celestial! You took a Local Apparent Noon sight.
Sixty-five years ago, my Dad was an airline pilot flying the Atlantic. In those days of propeller-driven airplanes and piston engines, there was always a navigator in the crew, shooting celestial fixes with a sextant and chronometer. At first they used a bubble sextant in a plexiglass dome on top of the fuselage. Later, they had periscopic sextants. At night they would shoot 3-star fixes and during the day, they would at least get a sun shot and sometimes the moon too.
Forty three years ago, I moved to San Jose CA. Lo and behold, a local Jr. College offered a class in celestial navigation! I signed up for it right away, and learned the whole nine yards about the skill. The instructor was an avid sailor; he had a sailboat in Santa Cruz and regularly navigated to places using celestial. He was also an engineer at Lockheed Missles & Space, in Sunnyvale. By far, it was the most cool class I ever took!
BTW, I'm still active at Truckee in the summer, flying and instructing in gliders over the Lake Tahoe area. Didn't hear from Brady & Blue, are they still in the area? Would be glad to connect with them if so. Please pass the word, thanks.
JDB / John Boyce
So,,, I walk into the VA the other day for blood labs and I sit down to wait my turn when I hear the theme music from SV DELOS!!! A guy sitting across from me is on UA-cam watching older videos as he just found the channel the day before and is going through them from the beginning!!! So I hear the music and say: DELOS??? He looks at me with surprise and says: HELL YEAH!!! Then a woman across the room says she watched Delos too!!! Funny thing, (to me anyway), is that we were all Navy!! How cool is that???
Wow that’s amazing! Humbled and honored…. Hope your blood tests went okay.
@@svdelos The guy said he saw another newer one with Taylor on it and then said: Who the hell knew so many hot women were into sailing!! Then he told me he started from the beginning... I told him he was going to see a lot of insane fun and a few tears and a new family come together along with more tears, but he would not be sorry about anything. That when the woman said: He's not wrong!!!!! lol...
Just don't ever say that you are bigger than Jesus!! HAhahahahahahahaaaa...
Yeah, I miss John too...
Brian Awesome teaching.....Never understood a Sextant until today....
Hello all the Delos crew, good luck and safe sailing.i rellly enjoy your videos .Just beware of the Wild Coast off Transkei, South Africa, if you come this way in the future. Godblees all.Don ,South Africa.
Great episode and interesting sextant overview. I really like the lighting and camera angle of Taylor pulling in the sheet during the tack.
What an amazing time. You are blessed.
There is something about a night sail, I think I prefer it to day sailing. You are usually alone with your thoughts but have a reason to be there. Mind you, in a gale in shipping traffic, not so much. Thanks for keeping me entertained during the short dark cold days in the northern Europe with the boat laid up.
When ever I hear the Delos song in the intro it makes my heart glad, knowing I am about to go on another daily adventure with the Delos crew. I am so glad you have kept this song from the beginning. If you ever think about swapping it out, "Don't! It is iconic and truly apart of Delos. Love the videos and I have watch from the very beginning. Fair winds and may the sun always shine on your faces!
Kiril & Brian: Right from the start I must say that you've given 'B-Roll' a whole new meaning....butt, I digress.
:-P
I'm beginning to be able to spot Kiril's editing at times, methinks....🤔
😂
Nice editing. Kiril’s editing has very smooth transitions.
@@KirilDobrev
Glad you're still involved with Delos. 🤠
I liked the celestial navigation segment. Plastic sextant and first timers; 26 miles off? I’d say you had very good results. Having used a high quality sextant in similar seas but on a 300 foot polar icebreaker, I was able to achieve a 1 mile variance on a relatively stable deck (the bottom of an icebreaker is shaped like a football .. doesn’t take much to get her rocking and rolling). Yourselves, on the other hand, on a 40 foot sailboat makes for a much more challenging task to chase the sun with any expectation of achieving useful results. Keep practicing! You will get better ... even with a plastic sextant.
I love my buddaman sailcloth bag. Great construction quality and it’s perfect as a weekender bag or for me to jam all my foulies into for a sailing adventure.
You sure know how to start a movie. This sailing biz looks brutal so far.
Steering the ship by the stars must feel wonderful. You are doing something that hasn’t changed for millennia following the exact same stars on the same ocean that Nelsons navy would have traveled.
Another day, another adventure! Love all of you! Peace!
Oh the beautiful Taylor and girls are becoming quite the sailors
It occurred to me Brian watching the bit where Kazza is playing with Nugget in her bunk that you guys are compiling the most amazing family album for Nugget as she grows up into adulthood. Not that I am wanting to wish her childhood away.
Gave me a warm feeling inside. Family is everything and makes us what we are. Greg 🇬🇧
I was always taught that when you mess with the sheets in the winches you always pull with your thumbs facing you. That way, in case something slips, the back of your heel/hand hits the winch instead of your thumb getting squeezed in between the sheet and the winch. I never had an issue, but it was one thing that I definitely remember from our sailing school. What's your thoughts?
I think I always did it that way too.
Love your channel and adventures. I really like the way Brian teaches his crew.
This looks to be the funniest sail to anywhere I've ever watched...best fun I've had on dry land the Nugget is getting so big an tall. Thanks for sharing your lives with us and Fare winds an following sea's guy's✌🏻💗😊❣️
Nice to see my fave Canadian explorer among your crew.
That was a cool video !! I really liked how you brought out the sexton device and had everyone take a turn to learn it. I think that everyone into boating the Ocean should learn how to use one. I also think you should bring that out more frequently with this crew until everyone can get within a 10 - 30 mile radius. Then teach all the newcomers onto Delos
Ahoy Brian! Couple squibs (nothing witty, just like the sound of it) from Nebraska...
We're up to 25 speakers, housed in 8 Klipsh cabinets, for our Marantz to play your theme over. Great sound! We turn it up every week. Thank you 😊
The changing sky is quite a "behold the hand of God" thing, especially dusk to dawn, when viewing in solitude. So nice to see a thing we greatly appreciate here in the "midwest sea" in your focus.
Blessings and Peace ✌ 🙏
Taylor fits in so well it's almost like she was still on board with @Sailing Doodles. I swear you could drop her on any boat and Taylor will thrive.
Not to mention her unforgettable “assets”. Brains and beauty combined. @taylorstravels.
@Nikko Agree, but somehow I can't see her on LaVagabond.
Yeah, kudos to vagabonds success. Just seem to be too far leaning liberal/hippy for my taste.
Taylor’s got a great personality and seems very grounded.
Hay guys love what your doing out there 😉. I think I want a Saxton now. Lol.
I hope I'm not too far behind time & have left things too late because I would love to own a piece of delos history. 😘 😘 😘. Keep up the good work delos people. Sv Kiwi Lady Opua Bay of islands New Zealand.
Never a dull moment every week and the new crew blends well aboard Delos. Thank you for the view and shares from my hometown vessel...youse guys rock!
You sir have THE best voice on UA-cam.
Not bad with the sextant. Great to see people trying to keep up the old school practice which I learned back at the Maritime Academy and use at sea to keep my skills up :) Nice work
That bikini army you have assembled is absolutely terrifying!!!!!!
What a way to live !!! So jealous. Enjoy
Teaching your crew member to stare by the stars and the field of the helm was epic especially in this day and age!
It worried me when you brought out the plastic sextant and everyone became confused. However, anyone who's captain ing a boat especially a sailboat should know how to use a sextant. That was so awesome that you exposed your crew to the traditional navigation skills. In a pinch on all power is down I can save lives.
I'm hoping Brian has a stainless steel Sexton and his tool chest. I bet he does.
Glad you tuned your crew in to the manual factors....Dependency on instruments can cancel out visual and audible awareness of what's really going on.neat episode!
Great video gang. Kaza, great work with the camera. That piece when you're looking down at the dark blue water was fantastic. So many great things to say about this video. Love everyone of you, especially Nugget and her funny pull up. I laughed so hard! 💗💗💗💗💗 (this one is for Nugget) ❤️🥰
I surprisingly enjoyed this video alot...its amazing how knowledgeable you are and that you share this knowledge with the crew, looking forward to more 💯👌🏼⛵
You learn something every day, if you pay attention. If you're lucky you get a hunger for learning that lasts until your last breath.
All the usual fun things in this video...and...navigation! and steering by stars! I think that was Antares in Scorpius lined up vertically with your mast in the steer by stars sequence. A very bright reddish star with a less bright star above and below a short distance. Antares being the heart of the scorpion in the middle of the body. Just a guess...don't take me as an authority. I recently had my own first experience steering by the stars. Caught me by surprise as we prepared to gybe and I wanted to hand steer a slow turn but couldn't see the water that is my usual guide....ta da! There were the stars to help me steer a smooth, slow gybing turn.
I really liked the lessons in hand steering by the stars and your intro to shooting the sun! Thanks!
The 8:00 minute mark is great! What a beautiful day on the water.
Interesting-my former father inlaw knew how to follow the stars while he was in the service? An age old tradition. Amazing. ⭐️
Brian-this was a super great video learning how to use the sextant- really educational as well as experiential -thank you-you’re a great teacher. 👍
In celestial navigation the real accuracy comes from shooting multiple stars a little before sunrise or after sunset. Back in the old days before GPS or Loran you'd shoot & calculate a good fix in the morning, then use dead reckoning throughout the day. Pull an accurate latitude by shooting the sun at local apparent noon, and then correct the dead reckoning fix with an accurate evening fix. (And hoping that you'd have decent visibility most mornings/evenings to get angles on multiple stars with a good spread from different directions on the horizon.) With a good timepiece and quality sextant, practice and decent visibility you could cross the ocean and arrive on the other side with accuracy within a mile or two. Not bad!
I was the navigator on a US naval ship in the 90s and we'd still break out the sextant and shoot the stars to stay in practice. Life as a surface warfare officer was very busy, so I didn't get the chance to do it personally as much as I would have liked but it was a fun diversion every so often!
Ha ha ha! Nugget looks exhausted. I'm such a coward out at sea but with weather like this, who doesn't I want to be out there.
Thank you Brian for teaching us some celestial navigation like my dad Jim or Sahib Jim tried to teach mom Memsahib Bettt and me back in the day.. my mom was a trooper and took navigator and captain courses with the Power Squadton.. he made Captain and Navigators license..mom who did it for dad really wanted to support him but she like me weren't into the math or super accuracy aspects of it. My dad and his English boss (they made top grade filter paper and the company at one point bought Chemex Coffee from an elderly couple and then sold it within weeks of Mr Coffees debut... dad and boss flew around the world stopping in many countries on one was India where he picked up the Sahib and Memsahib names ...few had flown on one trip around the world at that time. Dad was one of first days to fly Concode to England to see his boss. You have the sane kind of guts for navigation things but a gentler teaching way.. Still I think you would have liked him a Navy man and always lover of the sea. Thanks Brian and crew including Nugget for doing amazing living and enjoying life on the waves of the world ..
wow - just realised i've watched 341 Delos vlogs - it's been a privilege, thank you Delossians
Delossians. I love that.
👍 good Brian for taking time to teach. Some, like Steve on Fair Isle, don't care to use a sextant or even have any paper charts aboard. His words, not mine. He only trust electronics. He will learn after a lighting strike at sea.
Brian explains everything so well.
Stellar edits. You guys are doing so well. I love the crew and I love the vibe.
I did deliveries in the eighties and nineties. There was no gps, only SatNav which was unreliable, sometimes no fix for days. As the navigator I used celestial daily, conditions permitting. I NEVER bothered with a noon sight ever. I did a running fix using sun lines.
One part you skipped which is critical for accuracy is accurate time. You get that off the time tick on sb.
Also, we’d never just do one sight. We’d do about eight and use the average, tossing out the ones that were wildly different. (In big seas you’ll get bad sights sometimes, you have to hold on with your legs because it takes both hands) Back then few ships had gps as well so a meeting at sea gave the navigators a chance to check their math on the radio. We’d use our DR on top of our last fix to determine current position (adding in set and drift). Usually we’d be within a mile our our computed position when we compared notes. It was like a game everyone played.
Eventually gps came down to $1500, which was a lot of money in ‘90, and I was replaced.
I love episode 56 to 95 an 141 to 173. God bless sv delos.
Great video. If you keep a time piece on GMT it saves you from having to calculate zone time. A good metal sextant is well worth the investment, and with practice your fixes will become very accurate.
Another great video!!! Looks like Ya'll are having a blast!!
Very cool love how you are always teaching and sharing your knowledge Brian
Hand steering by the stars
Rain... BATH TIME! That was indeed a gorgeous sky. Excellent piloting technique by the stars, Brian. I once flew for about four hours over the darkest and least-lit forests and swamps. We still had a hand-held GPS, but were often out of range of radio navigation. Spooky! But the stars kept us company, and it's a lot easier on the eyes, and senses, to track in the general direction of a constellation than to hold heading while also holding altitude and bank.
Watching your celestial navigation class. I used to be our squadron's Cel Nav monitor, which means I had the dubious honor of recalculating and re-plotting all the other squadron navigators' semi-annual celestial training events. Fun! (not).
You did good! However, when it comes to resetting chronometers before fixing your position, you're better off obtaining a latitude by Polaris, first, then noting the time when well-known E-W star or planet kisses the horizon. Then, assuming your clock can keep time to within a few seconds a day, (GPS clock... ha...) the rest of your sextant-shot positions will be more accurate.
By the way, the distance between your observed and actual position is precisely 24.21823 nm.
That's VERY nice shooting for a hand-held plastic sextant!
Good fun! So fun watching the adventures!
Last comment, I'm celebrating a new 'job', if I want it. Delos has restored my faith in so many things. So thank you guys. I'm subscribed already. Next step is Patreon if I take the job. I love navigation also. So this was fun.
Brian, you are always knocking them out of the park. Another great video.
Even, after the ball and chain, you still managed sirens for SV Delos, Impressive! And it's definitely not your unlimited wealth of monetary tangible economic prowess, but only known among us the Romantics. The Unattainable and perhaps only by adhering to the truest yearning of effort. To chase your Dream. My hats off to you sir, Captain Brian, not only you caught the Dream, but you also snatched the bright Star, that was ever so shining near the Constellation of Southern Cross. (It will be Acrux or Gacrux btw)
Fun, fun! Fair winds guys! ⛵🧭🌈🌅🏝️🐬🥃👌🏻🤙🏻
Another great episode.
I’ll bet the Cribbage queen wins the next game or 3. 😆 Great video guys and looking forward to the next!
26 miles off was good all things considered. And your right, it would help get out of a jam if the all else broke.
A good start to celestial navigation instruction I’ve found to be:
1) The sun is always over some point on earth, right?
2) If you had a book that told you where that point was for every moment and
3) you took your sextant and discovered the sun was directly over your head
4) you’d know you were on that point.
Next:
1) let’s say it’s local noon, on the exact moment of the equinox (so the sun in right over the equator ) and you’re on a boat sailing south towards the equator. You know you’re still in the northern hemisphere.
2) You take out your sextant and find the sun in 80 degrees above the southern horizon.
3) 90 - 80 =10 and
4) You now know your latitude is 10 degrees north
This helps newbies in thinking about geography and basic ideas and keeps the logic and math simple at first.
Pink in the morning sailor take warning, Pink in the night sailors delight..
This was a great segment I just loved it. You have had other videos with the Sextant it's great. As always may you all have a safe sail and the time of your life.
I used to plot out missile debris, and test shots of artillery and such, on a test range. It was always about intersecting angles, and the more angles I was given (and it grew in time as my security clearance was enhanced), the more accurate I could plot impact. It was so much fun, probably the most fun I ever had at a job. The devil is in the details, I will leave them out. Suffice it to say, if I had a sextant back then, I might have walked outside and look for the 'smoke trail'. It would have helped a little.