Principles of Celestial Navigation


A Day in the Life of a Navigator » Three-Star Fix, Morning » Plotting the Morning Three-Star Fix

Chief Sheedy: Now that you’ve completed your strip form, we’re now ready to plot our three-star fix.

Capella was already plotted; we’re now going to plot Deneb. The bearing is 304 decimal 6 to the geographic position. From our assumed position or the DR in this case, we plot 304 decimal 6. Just like with Capella, I like to point an arrow to geographic position. Applying Ho-Mo-To, it’s 5 minutes towards. So we’ll get 5 minutes of latitude, towards the geographic position of Deneb. A line perpendicular to the azimuth, bring it to 5 minutes towards our geographic position and this is our line of position. Properly label: Deneb. The azimuth of Fomalhaut was 196. Draw 196, arrow, GP. It was 13.4 miles away from the GP. A line perpendicular, and that’s our line of position for Fomalhaut. Then properly label.

We now have an excellent celestial fix. Draw a circle around it. Time 0800.

screenshot of Universal Plotting Sheet with morning three-star fix marked