Celestial Navigation at Night

Great coverage in a concise manner of the concepts of celestial navigation, but you had better be up on the jargon before you delve in. They do cover the acronyms, but rather quickly and not in depth. However if you have come to the point in your studies where you are comfortable with terms like: GMT LAT GP LHA GHA AP Ho Hs and so on , this will put the theoretical principles together for you in a concise explanation better than any other resource I ever seen. Easy and quick to follow and fun to watch though a bit "Campy" because of the 1960's vintage animated characters.I second what the other reviewer has to say about the added feature of "History of Navigation." It may be a little interesting but it is not at all related to the study of celestial navigation. It is far more interesting in terms of what we were thinking about for high tech navigation ooptions in the days before GPS became a reality. Still I would have given the overall DVD 5 stars because the C. Nav instructional part is excellent and no one says you have to watch the extra feature; and unless you are just curious or bored I wouldn't bother.Here is my rub:THERE IS NOTHING SPECIFIC IN HERE ABOUT CELESTIAL NAVIGATION AT NIGHT !In fact only the LISTING says "....Navigation at Night" the ACTUAL package for the DVD makes no such claim. So it isn't the producer's error, it is Amazon's listing error. Celestial at night is a subject that no one seems to pay any attention to other than to say the horizon is unreliable for regular sextant sights without ever offering much insight as to why that would be so or what accuracy could be expected in moonlight conditions. If you are offshore away from city lights then three weeks out of four there is plenty of moonlight to see a horizon, so I was curious about why isn't it done? I have made passages when the availability of a clear sky and a clear horizon has eluded us for days on end. If my only opportunity was a night sight after a time like that you can bet I would take it.... but it would be nice to know what considerations/limitations/corrections to apply to the result. When I stumbled on this listing I thought there might be some subject mater on nighttime c. nav and I wanted to see what insights might have been offered. After all the Polynesians and the Arabs did it at night.... or so the lore tells us... so why not present day navigators? Of course night sights are possible if you have a bubble horizon as would be always be used in aircraft and sometimes used as an accessory to marine sextants. Since this DVD is about aircraft celestial navigation I suppose you could argue that it would apply to night sights... but it isn't specific about night sights.In summary;If you want a concise explanation of what the heck you are actually doing as you thumb through the almanac and the sight reduction tables, as well as a great explanation as to how to thumb through those tables, this is the best resource I have found to date. It really pulls it all together in a way that makes it make sense and instructional part is only 50 minutes long total. I'd bet you couldn't read and understand Mary Blewitt's fine and popular book on the subject in an hour! If you were hoping for information specific to night sights, it isn't here.

I watched the whole thing, and the concepts are rewally well done, but not by them. This whole video on celestial navigation was a Naval Aviation training video done in the late 60's I would guess. The concepts are very very covered and you can pause it to take notes. I would recommend watching through the whole thing first once or twice, and THEN watch it again and take notes. This way you do not write down every other word they say. Just the key points.They lost two stars with their last video which has nothing to do about anything called "Pathfinders From The Stars". It is an early 60's film presentation about one of our very first satelite navigation systems using cameras to take pics of a satellite and then compare it to stars. It is completely useless and pretty sure it was put in there as a time filler to say they have a _ hr video in their advertisements. They say it is useful in space exploration at the end and they show a Gemini capsule in orbit.

Although dated, it provides a very clear explanation of the process and helped solidify some ideas that I had difficulty with when reading on the subject.