Once the universal system of navigating out of sight of land, celestial navigation is now a backup to electronic navigation systems, chief among them GPS. Among cruising sailors, however, the ability to locate one's position on the ocean using a sextant is still a source of pride and respect. And for sailors who venture offshore, proficiency with a sextant is a more practical matter: It is the only way to determine your position if the GPS receiver malfunctions or your boat loses electrical power.The Complete On-Board Celestial Navigator is the perfect package for the cruiser in the GPS era. Traditionally, the aspiring celestial navigator would need a costly and unwieldy collection of resources to get started: an instructional book to teach sight-taking skills; a star-finder to identify navigation stars; a nautical almanac to determine the precise location of each star or planet at the moment of sighting; and sight reduction tables to crunch the numbers and produce the fix. Together these volumes take up a lot of space and cost up to $300, plus $25 every year for a new almanac.The Complete On-Board Celestial Navigator combines all the necessary components in a single, affordable package--including worldwide sight-reduction tables and a nautical almanac that's good for five years. It achieves this by acknowledging that, since celestial is now used primarily as a backup system by navigators whose skills are rusty, a high level of accuracy is unlikely to be obtained by the navigator, so a high level of precision in the nautical almanac and sight reduction tables is irrelevant. By reducing the accuracy of the almanac data (from one-tenth of a minute to one minute of arc), it is possible to present five years of nautical almanac in only 60 pages, and sight reduction tables in 40 pages. The result is a complete celestial navigation kit at a modest price-everything you need but the sextant. The second edition incorporates a number of improvements. For each local time zone, on any given day, Bennett has identified the three stars that are easiest to shoot (in terms of brightness, altitude, and distribution) to produce a basic fix-a tremendous aid for the novice navigator. This second edition also features new explanatory diagrams and page-edge tabs to orient the reader within the book.