Talk:Navigation/Archive 1

Talk before October 2006
I have scanned Wikipedia for compass use and navigation and feel that it could be enhanced. My son has prepared a page that he might share with you. Please have a look at it. I will be glad to be the go between. Thanks for all the good work done be your contributors.

Alison Phillips See this page: http://luna.moonstar.com/~acpjr/VADF/Navigation/MapCompass.html


 * That page looks interesting, note however that it seems to be concerned mainly with land navigation, so it would probably best to make a new article specifically about this (if there is not already one, but I think there is not). If your son's work can be released under the conditions described under Copyrights, we'll be glad to accept it. Thanks, Kosebamse 12:16, 19 Nov 2003 (UTC)

Celestial Navigation changes...

change relative position.. the stars don't change their position relative to each other. I changed the wording so there wouldn't be confusion.

Determining local noon is very easy, as you are taking your readings you are moving whatever measuring device you have in one direction since the sun is rising. When the sun "stalls" at the top of the sin wave, you know it immdiately because you stop following it and then see it drop below the line on your device.

The reason that clocks were necessary for longitude was so that you knew what time it was at the known port, not to determine when your local noon occurs. It is a time difference calculation, hence the need for an accurate clock to carry the "time" from home with you.

Even before radio direction finders, the radio was valuable for navigation since the time at a given location could be broadcast. Synchronization of clocks on ships with radio broadcasts was an interesting ritual developed to minimize the calculations for calibrating of the clock.

Night time navigation without instruments is much easier than daytime navigation. Polaris is used to maintain whatever head you desire by simply keeping it at a known location relative to your bow. You latitude can be determined anytime you can see polaris. East and west are easily determined with any star that is visible by watching the direction of travel. A clear night was a blessing to the navigator and helmsman. On a clear day, you were largely limited to a single latitude reading at noon.

If you could see any star near the horizon and any piece of land you could determine latitude by the angle the star followed rising or falling.

How much interest is there in the actual formulas for navgation? wanda

Hi, I was wondering if anyone had ever attempted to write a description of and/or basic tutorial for the use of maneuvering boards, and would like to volunteer to do so if noone has. Thanks --nekonobaka

Celestial Navigation
I though this article had too much on Celestial Navigation. I deleted it rather then move it to Celestial Navigation because it seemed like a good article that may didn't need the extra material. If I have lost good info in the process it can be worked back in. KAM 13:48, 11 October 2006 (UTC)
 * New user Captclbecker just restored a bunch. I think he may have not realized that celestial has its own article and that the details are probably best kept there with a 1-paragraph entry here. Hopefully Captclbecker can comment here and we can work out who will change the article. - Davandron | Talk 14:22, 25 January 2007 (UTC)

Questionable link
Are these appropriate for the navigation article?


 * http://indoorLBS.com/ Local Positioning Systems for Navigation - Complimentary and Alternative Positioning Technologies to GPS]
 * http://www.lbsinsight.com/ LBS Insight] News site on wireless navigation services

Seems like linkspam - Davandron | Talk 23:58, 24 January 2007 (UTC)

Merge of Passage Planning
Passage planning seems to be able to be contained within the Navigation article. The brand-new article doesn't contain significantly more text than was here. - Davandron | Talk 03:00, 6 March 2007 (UTC)
 * In the passage planning article, I've spliced in some edited text from section 2507 of the 2002 Bowditch wherein passage planning is viewed as an aspect of brige resource management. I've also added some recent legal and technological and removed some information that seems like "how to dr" and "how to take a fix."  My original motivation for the split was to 1) open it up for some aggressive editing without disturbing Navigation, and 2) clear the way to incorporate some of the information into Second Mate and Quartermaster. Cheers. Haus42 22:02, 6 March 2007 (UTC)
 * Agree with Haus42 on splitting and suggest to rather merge the section from "navigation" into "passage planning" --Best, any IP. 07:50, 24 March 2007 (UTC)

Since my original suggestion to merge, Haus42 has done a great job filling out the passage planning article. As such, I here-by revoke my suggestion to merge. Since there hasn't been any additional comment supporting a merge in three weeks, I'm going to pull the tags from both pages. Thanks again Haus42! - Davandron | Talk 00:43, 27 March 2007 (UTC)

Sailing re-organization effort
Although Navigation is not limited to navigation while under sail, I thought readers of this talk page might be interested to help with this. Take a minute to read the comments at Talk:Sailing#Re-write effort -- non how-to et seq. Some of us are working on re-organizing the sailing-related articles. See if you agree with our approach and give us some help. Mrees1997 21:01, 29 December 2006 (UTC)

Getting this article to b-class
I was WP:BOLD and made some significant changes in the article today to try and open up a path towards making this a b-class article. The biggest changes were structural: grouping modern stuff together and removing a section on the point system. I also replaced the "types" section with text from the public domain section 101 of Bowditch 2002. If there are no objections, I'd like to continue, using WP:SUMMARY to add sections for piloting, radio/radar, and satellite navigation.

"Navigation in other cultures" strikes me as a minefield. I've had a couple of notions about what to do with it, and I think the best approach might be to split it off into another article. Any feelings? Cheers. H aus  Talk  16:49, 16 April 2007 (UTC) (p.s. archived old talk, too)

History of navigation split
In the process of rewriting the History section, the article grew to 50 kilobytes. As Navigation is still missing some significant pieces (bearing, range, latitude, longitude, prime meridian, etc...) and is likely to keep growing steadily, I decided to split History of navigation off to its own article. Probably the best thing to do would be to summarize the history article here on Navigation... Cheers. H aus  Talk  14:45, 22 April 2007 (UTC)

There is a significant section related to air navigation that should be included. The use of Pressure Lines of Position were used frequently in aircraft over-ocean navigation prior to inertial or satnav. I was taught this as an Air Force navigator in the early '70s, and went on to use it as a B-52 navigator. An excellent synopsis can be found at: http://fer3.com/arc/m2.aspx/Pressure-line-position-LaPook-dec-2010-g14963  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 209.22.180.109 (talk) 15:33, 7 April 2017 (UTC)

Piloting and Pilotage
These topics seem to have a significant problem: the terminology simply doesn't seem to be used as recorded here. Bowditch, for example, defines piloting as " navigat[ion of] a vessel through restricted waters." (ref) Likewise, googling on "pilotage" indicates that it means the provision of piloting services, and not the act of navigation itself. I can find no evidence of a British/American division on this either.

I'd like to try to straighten this out, but I'm asking for some support for the current definitions before I go and make a radical rearrangement of this and other articles of dubious terminology (e.g. seamark). Mangoe 16:20, 7 June 2007 (UTC)


 * I'll have to look for a reference, but I have definitely seen "pilotage" used roughly as described in this article, and not as a term for "what a ship's pilot does". Paul Koning 15:16, 7 June 2007 (UTC)


 * I seem to have come across some references to this with respect to aviation. Looking at the various official admiralty-type websites, however, shows a consistent use in reference to pilotage as the supplying of pilots. Mangoe 16:23, 7 June 2007 (UTC)


 * Has anyone referred to Bowdich (The Practical Navigator)for a definition? I will look it up to make certain, but I believe it refers to piloting as visual navigation within sight of land and restricted maneuverability.  Using DR, Visual and radar fixes to maintain a running track of the vessels position.I55ere (talk) 17:28, 21 June 2008 (UTC)


 * This definition of "pilotage" gives the article a very strong maritime bias. "Pilotage" is also used by aviators to refer to any navigation by reference to landmarks, regardless of the airspace being flown through, the only requirement being good visibility. 174.101.198.62 (talk) 03:18, 24 February 2014 (UTC)

Another terminology issue
This time it's sea mark, which is utterly unsourced. Again, I can't find evidence that it is used in the sense given here, at least not widely so. It most commonly appears as a catch-all term in legal lists (e.g. "No person shall make fast to, or interfere with, any light, beacon, sea mark, racing buoy or tide pole in the river." ). Other references speak of "sea marks" as more or less ad-hoc landmarks. The only case where I've found "sea mark" used as in the article is in a few Canadian boating sites, and they also use the the alternate terminology interchangeably.

The universal term here seems to be aid to navigation, or navigational aid. Right now the former has no article and the latter is stubby. It appears that two projects made two articles independently. My impulse is to fold everything into one of the two latter terms, and right now, I'm tending to prefer the former to the latter, as it is the form which seems to occur in formal definitions by the governing bodies. But before I do this I'd like to see if there is something behind the "sea mark" article of which I am unaware. Mangoe 21:32, 29 June 2007 (UTC)

Derivation of word navigation
In the second sentence, I doubt the sanskrit derivation is true. I think the correct derivation is as described in : http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=navigation.--Tvbanfield (talk) 20:42, 4 November 2008 (UTC)

Marine navigation

 * The ideal marine should probably have a system integrated similar to the tempomaat Not sure where to put it dough

81.245.184.134 (talk) 15:29, 14 April 2009 (UTC)

Proposed name change
The scope of this article is limited to marine navigation and as such I propose that the article be renamed to "Marine Navigation". Comments or thoughts?Rubisco (talk) 08:31, 23 September 2009 (UTC)

===I think the name should not be changed. The word navigate is derived from the Latin roots "navis" meaning "ship" and gate referring to movement. Why be redundant and change the name to ""marine ship movement." Yes I know the term navigate has been extended to aircraft and space ships, but that can easily be delt with within the article.--Tvbanfield (talk) 00:23, 24 September 2009 (UTC)


 * I was also think along the lines of non-vehicular navigation, such as mountaineering, orienteering etc. Perhaps the answer is to extend the scope of this article to reflect these other, more diverse types of navigation.Rubisco (talk) 20:46, 24 September 2009 (UTC)


 * I was about to add a section here commenting on the obvious error in the opening which ignores navigation in the absence of a vehicle when I noticed this section. Since navigation on foot predates all other forms it is clearly inappropriate that an article headed 'Navigation' should ignore it. The passage on derivation of the word is inappropriate in the opening not least because words change their meaning over time, particularly becoming generalised to embrace concepts well beyond the scope of the origin. Either the article should be renamed to reflect its limited scope or, better, the opening should be completely rewritten to correctly reflect the subject. The derivation of the word, if it is to be included at all, this being after all an encyclopedia and not an etymological dictionary, should be in a subsidiary section. treesmill (talk) 08:39, 17 July 2010 (UTC)


 * I was just going to open a section here called "naive question," but I see my topic already opened. Per the navigation disambiguation page, "Navigation is the theory and practice of navigating, especially the charting of a course for a ship, aircraft, or spaceship (American Heritage Dictionary)."  If that is so, why is aircraft and space navigation not covered in this navigation article?  Actually, I wandered in here wanting more information on SPOFs as that article seems to fail to cover anything but computer SPOFs/potential SPOFs.  --Aladdin Sane (talk) 04:46, 6 October 2009 (UTC)

Help! In search for DR data.
I work with other historians on the origine of medieval portolan charts. The question how accurate dead reckoning (DR) navigation by sails could be is of overwhelming importance there. We could not find much historic date because most nautic historians supposed DR had the accuracy of the portolan charts from the same time. But that is in doubt.

I created a page with the DR data I found so far. If you have data or sources, please send it there or to its discussion page. Besides historians, it may be of interest to present sail navigators too. -- Portolanero (talk) 15:37, 9 May 2010 (UTC)

Celestial navigation
Weirdly enough, the article does not divide "Celestial navigation" in the subsections: "during the day" and "at night". Also the section about the chronometer should be made smaller and integrated to the sextant. Finally, in the section or even in the entire article, there is no mentioning of the gnomon, kamal, Cross-staff, Backstaff or astrolabe

See http://books.google.be/books?id=i7-HX1Dx_b8C&pg=PA46&lpg=PA46&dq=gnomon+and+navigation+and+arabian&source=bl&ots=cgCBg1gJPl&sig=cf8y8aYZPIovev0UxCjmvn2rbC4&hl=nl&ei=hTbuTPumFMiphAegwP3tCw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=4&ved=0CDIQ6AEwAw#v=onepage&q=gnomon%20and%20navigation%20and%20arabian&f=false (gnomon= oldest navigation equipment )

http://nabataea.net/sailing.html

also, the Sounding_line, the most useful instrument for navigation troughout history hasn't been mentioned.

91.182.136.18 (talk) 09:16, 22 November 2010 (UTC)

Attention: the link to the "Precision navigation tutorial at University of New Brunswick" is outdated. The GGE department of this university does, however, have a good collection of research and learning material which might be worth-while to link: see http://gge.unb.ca/Resources/Resources.html. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 145.64.134.242 (talk) 08:25, 10 June 2011 (UTC)

proposed chart update




The below is blah, isn't a good brief for those confused about which is longitude or latitude. The above is a memory tool that double re-inforces itself. Why: reader may not know which is being discussed in text (what the writer knows). Example if you say it is N-S line does that mean of deg. changing or deg. equal? if i don't already know i still don't know how degrees are marked!)

The chart below fails to show simple degrees for any country or time.

The below is repeated on 50+ similar wiki pages. The one above might be said to add little, but i think a good memory tool may be central to understanding the rest of the topic for those that don't already know which is which degrees to lines. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Navstar55 (talk • contribs) 18:08, 23 March 2014 (UTC)

Solar compass and theodolite
the Solar_compass and theodolite aren't mentioned. They were used in WW2 by the SAS, see http://www.amazon.com/The-SAS-Tracking-Navigation-Handbook/dp/1585744603 http://www.angelfire.com/space/aubry/sastraining.html mention in article 109.130.186.68 (talk) 11:34, 12 September 2014 (UTC)

External links modified
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Need information on Space Navigation
Space Navigation redirects here however I cannot find any information about it in the article. I was hoping to learn about how astronauts and probes navigated in space. I think some information should be added but if not then remove the redirect since theres no information about Space Navigation here. Xanikk999 (talk) —Preceding undated comment added 01:59, 6 November 2017 (UTC)

External links modified (January 2018)
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Nomination of Portal:Transport for deletion
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Nomination of Portal:Nautical for deletion
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