Norie's Nautical Tables, 2018 Edition

Wonderfull book, learned about it from a South African Mate during an ocean crossing from Cape Town to the Acores.I had learned to do celestial navigation with almanac and self-programmed formulas. Nories enables you to do it with tables only.

As a newbie in celestial navigation, I thought I might be able to replace my heavy collection of sight reduction tables with a single volume. It is certainly possible: you can use your DR position and the results are accurate to around 0.1'. The price paid is complexity. I find sight reduction is much quicker with the standard tables (229 or 249) - although the intercepts are longer. There are brief explanations of the tables and how they can be used, but it does take a bit of effort to learn to use them.Logarithms of trig functions are shown as both standard and "tabular" logarithms. My gears were spinning badly on tabular logarithms, but I believe they are just standard logarithms to which 10 has been added for convenience - to eliminate negative logarithms that arise for numbers between 0 and 1. If you have to multiply three numbers together, for example, you add their logarithms - so when using tabular logarithms, you have to subtract 20 from the result to get the tabular logarithm of the product. This is because you only want 10 added to the result, not 30. A bit tricky for me at first! Haversines, both natural and their logarithms are also given, also with the equivalent tabular logarithms, and these are very useful for great circle calculations.There's a lot more here than just sight reduction, though. There are tables of meridional parts for rhumb line DR, for example. The coastal navigation tables are a useful collection for piloting, including distance of the sea horizon, sextant ranges and a 3cm radar range table. There are also useful conversion tables - any cruising yacht skipper will have to convert units in foreign ports!There is also an impressive listing of seaports with latitudes and longitudes, organized under geopolitical headings. Ports are also listed alphabetically with page, column and line numbers so you can find them. There are six ports in the book with the imaginative name of "Newport"!The book publisher should be congratulated for keeping this classic of the nautical literature in print - it's a lot of work for what I'm guessing is a niche publication, and it's possible that minor errors remain. For example, in my copy there are four incorrect entries in the table on page 483, repeated inside the back cover, the table for "Decimals of a Degree". The entries for 0.2', 0.4', 0.5' and 0.8' in the top row are identical with those for 59.2' through 59.8' in the bottom row, (which appear to be correct). Fortunately, the error is obvious. The last four entries in the top row should be 0.003, 0.007, 0.010 and 0.013, according to my calculator. I'll just pencil in the right numbers.The typesetting is slightly imperfect at times, for example on page 366 where the font is a fraction too large for the available space. This is not a major problem as only the very tops of the numbers disappear and they are still quite readable, but if you want a nit to pick, that's one you can pick. The average reader will easily cope with these minor issues.

The book came in excellent condition.

Well made, clearly presented edition of norries tables, a must have for deck officer

High quality for a good price

Just right

Excellent

Excellent-rekindled my love of navigation.