Celestial Navigation Step by Step: A Practical Course in Sun, Star, and Polaris Sights for the Small-Boat Navigator

Twenty-nine lessons that take you from holding a sextant to a full day's work at sea, one skill at a time, in the order a navigator actually needs them. Each lesson states its goal, lists what you need, walks you through numbered steps with a diagram at every point where the geometry matters, shows a worked example on a real sight form, warns you about the mistakes that cost miles, and sets practice problems with full answers at the back.

You will learn to measure and apply index error, dip, refraction, and semidiameter; to take a Sun sight and bring the body down to the horizon; to take the noon sight for latitude and time it for longitude, and to know what that timing can and cannot promise; to reduce a Sun sight at any hour with a calculator and two formulas, plot the line of position, and carry it forward for a running fix; to recognise the navigational stars, find latitude from Polaris, plan a twilight, take three stars and Venus or Jupiter, and fix the boat from the cocked hat; to keep the dead-reckoning plot that ties the sights together; to check the compass from the rising Sun; to judge what each error is worth; to fall back safely when the almanac, the calculator, or the watch is missing; and to make a landfall with the margins an uncertain longitude demands. A five-day practice passage of raw observations, six fully worked sight forms, a twenty-question readiness test, a sextant adjustment procedure, and a guide to reading a real almanac complete the course.

Every worked example uses one imaginary passage, so the numbers connect from lesson to lesson, and every figure in the examples comes from the book's own example almanac set: daily pages, increments, correction tables, a star list, and a star planning table are all included, computed for the passage dates so that each answer checks against its own tables. On a real passage you use the current official almanac; this book teaches you exactly how.

Written for sailors, cruising couples, coastal skippers going offshore, and anyone who wants the independence of fixing a position with a sextant, a watch, and a pencil. No mathematics beyond a scientific calculator's sine and cosine keys is needed.

Black and white interior, 6 x 9 inches, 127 pages.