Satellite navigation is standard in ocean navigation, while astronavigation plays a role in emergency navigation. The method still used today is based on the work of French frigate captain Marcq Saint Hilaire. Without question, this was an epoch-making achievement at the time and shaped navigation in maritime and aviation until well into the last century. The irony of it all was that it was previously unknown practitioners, a naval officer and a merchant captain, who created a new form of astronavigation, thereby pushing aside the work of world-renowned scientists such as Carl Friedrich Gauss and Leonhard Euler.
Using astronavigation as an emergency backup makes sense. A responsible sailor will not want to forego a fallback option for navigation on long voyages. The sea is not a safe place, and a failure of electronic navigation would send his ship back to the 19th century. In addition, there are also sailors who would enjoy navigating with a sextant without having to go through the usual learning stress. In this case, only an app can help.
When searching for a suitable computer app, you will find numerous applications, all of which are based on Saint Hilaire’s line of position navigation. The literature and all articles on the internet still declare this method to be the ultimate in astronomical navigation.
However, during my research, I discovered that as early as the 19th century, many authors lamented that the precise methods of scientists, mathematicians and scholars were being supplanted by the spread of new graphical straight line methods. On the other hand, these exact methods would not have stood a chance at that time anyway, as there were no computers. Their displacement still persists, however, which is mainly due to the fact that the Hilaire method has been used successfully for navigation worldwide for 150 years.
This is the only way to explain why even developers of computer apps believe that there is no better doctrine. As a result, this graphical approximation method is programmed on computers, which is nothing more than a copy of the work of a navigator from 100 years ago. It was not understood that the computer is now finally the tool with which the mathematically exact methods can be realised that had to be rejected in the 19th century because they were too computationally complex.
Since the analytical methods of astronomical navigation are obviously not or no longer known, this website was created. Its content consists not only of a description of the analytical methods. It also explains the tools used for navigation at sea, the sextant and the navigation app. Of course, it also explains how the app calculates the positions of the sun, making a nautical almanac superfluous.