Currently Scheduled Courses
Trinity Health Hospital Oakland — Education Center
44405 Woodward Avenue
Pontiac, MI 48341
Park in the southeast visitor parking lot.
Go in the single sliding door labeled “South Entrance,” then walk through to the lobby. Immediately as you reach the lobby, go down the stairs with the glass railing on your left.
Celestial Navigation expands the student's navigational skills with an understanding of celestial navigation and its theory.
This course deals with learning celestial positioning using the sun, moon, planets, and stars. Students will learn to reduce these sights by the Law of Cosines method, as well as the Nautical Almanac Sight Reduction (NASR) method. Students will also learn about sight planning techniques. With that knowledge, students will have the tools to take sights and complete a Celestial Navigation Sight Folder, which serves as the sole exam for this course.
While an understanding of marine navigational skills will certainly be helpful to students, this course does not have any prerequisite courses.
This course will begin with six sessions of classroom time, then students will have some time over the summer to practice with a sextant and take sights, and the class will resume with another six sessions in the fall. Students will need access to a sextant (available for rental) and current-year Nautical Almanac (available for purchase elsewhere online).
- Overview of the celestial bodies in the sky
- Find local mean time of solar and lunar phenomena and convert to zone time
- Taking sights and finding observed altitude, local hour, angle and declination
- Sight Reduction and Plotting by Law of Cosines
- Sight Reduction and Plotting by the Nautical Almanac
- Sight Planning
P/C Althea Doolittle, SN
Phil Doolittle, SN