Cocked Hats

Cocked Hats

It may not look like much on the plotting sheet, but that highlighted circle in upper left is a classic bit of navigation. It’s also very reassuring as it definitively tells you where you are.

iI presume it’s called a cocked hat because it resembles the tri-corn hats worn by naval officers in the age of sail. When trying to determine your location, 3lines of position no matter how you got them will cross each other either at a point (rarely) or in a manner that creates a triangle. That triangle is a cocked hat and the size of the triangle determines how accurately you’ve managed to locate yourself.

Here, I’ve had good success creating lines of position using the planet Jupiter and the stars Vega and Achernar. What is interesting is how much in error my estimated position is. That error is due to leeway and current. It’s not normally that large!

Small successes, big smiles.

Follow my tracks in real-time:
https://bit.ly/svseaburban