MacSailing.net

I will be taking a Celestial Navigation course with our local Canadian Power and Sail Squadron next fall.

At the local chandlery there is a hand-held celestial navigation 'computer' available - Celesticomp V. Almost $500 Cdn.

Does anyone know of a software program available for Mac OS X?

I'm in the process of computerizing my boat for next year, and it makes sense to use a software solution, if available.

Cheers,

Alan

A quick search returned:

Master's Mate $18
http://users.macunlimited.net/dmbaxter/s.../index.htm

Good luck with JN.

Best regards,
Mark

P/C Durham Sail & Power Squadron

Hi,

I am also getting into celestial navigation right now and checked the demo of masters mate.
Looks nice but the demo generates random errors.

I just bought the nautical almanac and printed out some sight reduction tables from http://pollux.nss.nga.mil/pubs/pubs_j_srta_list.html to practice that stuff the "old way" . Celestial navigation is pretty fun but it's also a good backup in case your electronics fail.

Das Kielschwein

If you have a Palm there's some great, inexpensive tools for them. My favorite is Celestnav, which can store numerous sightings and combine them into fixes. It has a built in almanac and was very useful when I was learning. It was also good at working out the monthly celestial navigation problems in the back of Offshore Navigator magazine.

Another useful Palm tool was Planetarium which can give you a sky view of any planet or star, very helpful in locating objects to shoot with your sextant.

A Palm plus these tools can still be cheaper than that fancy $500 calculator.