Celestial Navigation Online Home Study Course

Description

CELESTIAL NAVIGATION ONLINE HOME STUDY COURSE
Starpath

About The Course…

This course covers how to find position at sea from timed sextant sights of the sun, moon, stars, and planets plus other routine and special procedures of safe, efficient offshore navigation. No previous navigation experience is required — the only math involved is arithmetic (adding and subtracting angles and times). This is a practical, how-to-do-it course, which also includes clear explanations of how it works and how to do it well. Plus this course includes other crucial factors of ocean navigation besides just finding out where you are from the stars, such as logbook procedures, dead reckoning, error analysis, route planning, etc. At the end of this course, you will be ready for ocean navigation. Thousands of students have successfully learned celestial from these materials and gone on to cross oceans or circumnavigate the globe.

And you will not be left studying on your own. Registered for the course, you are just a keyboard click away from individual personal help whenever you need it.

All text materials are provided to complete the course. The only thing extra you might need are basic plotting tools (parallel rules, dividers and protractor). If you have no tools now, then our plotting tool kit will provide what you need… not just for the course, but for all of your future navigation underway as well.

You do not need a sextant to work the course.

Celestial Course Topics include:

• Lat, Lon, and nautical miles
• Principles of celestial navigation
• Sextant usage and care
• Noon sights for latitude
• Running fixes from the sun
• Ocean dead reckoning
• Time keeping
• Sextant sights and sight reduction of sun, moon, stars, and planets
• Star ID and sight planning
• Daily procedures and logbooks
• Route planning
• Compass checks at sea
• High seas radio usage
• Landfall procedures
• Use of calculators
• Use of NAO sight reduction tables
• Plus emergency navigation techniques and notes on the latest developments in GPS

No prerequisites are required, the course starts from the basics. Many thousands of students have successfully learned navigation from these materials and gone on to bare boat chartering or day sailing or world cruising in their own boats. With the electronic components, you can take the complete course with you as you travel, or use it to search the complete set of materials for specific topics. If you prefer to work on your own without computers, you have a complete syllabus with practice exercises and answers in the printed materials. If you want extra structure to your training, then take part in the online course for more discussion and individual quizzes at each lesson.

Each course includes free access to online Resources and discussion groups. The Student Discussion Groups are similar to Public Discussion Groups, but they are much more extensive including all classroom discussion since 2003. We have instructors in five different time zones, so if any question comes up, just post it in the Student Discussion Group for a quick answer—or search to see if someone has already asked the question for an even faster answer.