3. Practical Sights: Planning, Taking, Reducing and Plotting

This chapter provides a practical guide for planning, taking, reducing and plotting of celestial sights for readers studying towards their Certificate of Competency (CoC) for merchant seafarers or the Navigational Watchkeeping Certificate (NWC) for Naval cadets, or indeed any other national equivalent which meets the standards set out under SOLAS. This chapter uses NAVPAC 4 as the primary point of reference and can be worked through, step by step, with the instructions provided throughout the chapter; it is not intended that the NAVPAC elements of this chapter should be read in isolation. Given this chapter is based on NAVPAC v.4.0.12, incremental releases/updates may have marginally different functionality. Previous versions of NAVPAC (such as NAVPAC 3.4 (as supplied on the DP330 CD) contains the same almanac data and so will produce the same results but has less additional capability and does not benefit from the improved user interface. Newer versions of NAPVPAC should produce the same results though the user interface will likely be different.