Celestial Nav with a Sextant- How far off were we? (Part 3 of 6) SV Delos Ep 341 

I really wanted to name this video "I can see Uranus with my Sextant" but got voted down. Who's with me????

I am Jade’s grandma. Thank you so much for giving her the opportunity to sail and learn. It is truly an awesome adventure.

As apprentice officer on a container boat in 1978 I also did shoot the stars and the sun. I was the proud owner of an HP programmable digital pocket calculator. The second mate did the same calculations with the good old logarithmic tables. He then berated me that his position and my position were more than one mile separated and that an error of more than half a mile was not allowed because that could be the difference of being on the rocks or inside deep water. I then started to investigate where that difference came from. He used logarithmic table with 5 digits. I used digital calculation with 13 digits. So I sat down and calculate each step of my digital program on 5 digits. The result was that I ended up with the same position as the second mate. So my conclusion was that we had a different position because in our case the accuracy of the logarithmic tables was not enough. He was not amused to learn that with all his good intentions to convince me about the importance of accurate positions he ended up with the situation that he was the one with the wrong position. By then the GPS was still largely classified so that we got out of the 12" rack computer with LED display a position accurate to 200 m. That was a little bit less then the size of the boat.

If Brian was my teacher in school, I would have gotten much better grades, unless Taylor was also in the class, then forget all that.

Brian's a natural born leader. Great vibe you guys have going on passage!

The sextant lesson was really cool!! It´s so nice that you combine education stuff with a sailing vlog - that really teaches all of us something, way to go!

One of the good things I remember from my deployments to Afghanistan was being down range in the middle of the night with no light pollution and just staring up into the night sky and see the beauty of the universe.

this is why delos is at the top of the tree, in sailing circles, many modern sailors would not have a clue how to do this and if the gps network failed would have no clue where the next reef or rock lie . They mostly say oh i have 3,4, or 5 gps devices but that does not matter if there is no gps signal maybe just maybe with brians credibility in the sailing community, many will see how important a backup of celestial navigation is when the shit goes down . Well done brian you have really earned your position in the utube community much respect

I have to say thank you so much for adding the Night Time Sky shots in this one, truly stunning. I'm happy to hear the crossing is going so well and that things are so enjoyable. Beautiful Vessel, crew and family living their best lives, truly awesome. Fair winds, following seas, safe travels and God Bless...

I love how this episode is focused on the sky, from downpouring rain to hand steer with the shooting stars! Then the little tutorial of the sextant was wonderful. I guess my favorite episode for a while now :)

Brian you lucky dog. Beautiful sailing weather, beautiful crew and a wife we all love. I really like seeing the interaction with the crew.Love to Nuggs and fair winds for Kaz.

Great video Brian. You’re teaching the next generation important components about Delos and navigation. I can tell you have the heart of a teacher. Great job. Cheers and blessings for safe passage with your all lady crew. Nice to be along 👍🇺🇸😎...

I'm a professional mariner. 1600ton master and unlimited tonnage second mate. I gotta say Brian, you run a tight ship. even giving those ladies a little grief for showing up late to watch. watch standing is a big responsibility and should not be taken lightly. if you cant make it on time it becomes hard to trust your ability to stand the watch at all. Nice to see you keeping the art of celestial navigation alive. by taking a sight of the sun at its highest point in the sky (also called its zenith) you are determining LAN or local apparent noon which in conjunction with a precise reading of GMT and your local hour angle based on your longitude can be used to determine position. Well done

24:29 Sierra's weapon is her cuteness, unbeatable.

5 seconds into this episode, and I agree that's a pretty amazing start.

How can you guys not have over 1 million subscribers? I still can't believe it. I've been watching you guys for 7 years and love following your family & friends every week. I look forward to the moment you guys hit the 1 million subscribers. Keep you doing what you guys doing, it's absolutely amazing 👏 👌 ❤🙏✌

A little late, but I like like it! (I like it a lot!) : - ) It's 10:30 pm here so I'll have to add more tomorrow. But first, I must say that it was the best ever to meet ALL of you at the 2021 US Sailboat Show in Annapolis, MD! My Delos Tribe flag is looking good!

So,,, I walk into the VA the other day for blood labs and I sit down to wait my turn when I hear the theme music from SV DELOS!!! A guy sitting across from me is on RU-vid watching older videos as he just found the channel the day before and is going through them from the beginning!!! So I hear the music and say: DELOS??? He looks at me with surprise and says: HELL YEAH!!! Then a woman across the room says she watched Delos too!!! Funny thing, (to me anyway), is that we were all Navy!! How cool is that???

The crew of Delos is sooo cheeky (boldly rude, impudent, or disrespectful in usually a playful or appealing way)

Im binging and a tear fell down my cheek watching Brian guide Jaecee in her first ever night hand steering by following the stars. The genuine smile and amazement she showed made me so happy. Wow Brian you are so amazing letting the things you learned pass on to others. Even here on the channel. I am from sweden, just about to buy my own boat to fix upp and finally go on my first passage. Much thanks to the delos crew. All love!

Let it suffice to say from watching your latest sailing adventure that having a bubbly, nearly always smiling and laughing crew mate like the adorable Nugget on board, how could any day be anything less than Shangri-La.

Bryan as smart as you are with all of your electronic and mechanical wizardry, I’m glad you started to learn celestial navigation. I understand they put it back on the curriculum at the Naval Academy. Guess there is some concern that they can’t always take satellite navigation for granted. Smart move.

The sheer joy of steering by the stars was so obvious. Amazing.

Personally this was the best one yet, I'm very numbers oriented, distances, torques, speed etc. What a tutorial, serious stuff there.

The theme song still brings all the good memories of the Delos tribe..

I would give anything to experience sailing (like Delos is doing right now) but I never will .... Pushing 81 and my time is near. I'd love to see the night sky like I used too as a kid .... All the stars and we are part of the system.

Very cool that you're doing celestial! You took a Local Apparent Noon sight. Sixty-five years ago, my Dad was an airline pilot flying the Atlantic. In those days of propeller-driven airplanes and piston engines, there was always a navigator in the crew, shooting celestial fixes with a sextant and chronometer. At first they used a bubble sextant in a plexiglass dome on top of the fuselage. Later, they had periscopic sextants. At night they would shoot 3-star fixes and during the day, they would at least get a sun shot and sometimes the moon too. Forty three years ago, I moved to San Jose CA. Lo and behold, a local Jr. College offered a class in celestial navigation! I signed up for it right away, and learned the whole nine yards about the skill. The instructor was an avid sailor; he had a sailboat in Santa Cruz and regularly navigated to places using celestial. He was also an engineer at Lockheed Missles & Space, in Sunnyvale. By far, it was the most cool class I ever took! BTW, I'm still active at Truckee in the summer, flying and instructing in gliders over the Lake Tahoe area. Didn't hear from Brady & Blue, are they still in the area? Would be glad to connect with them if so. Please pass the word, thanks. JDB / John Boyce

One of the better real world explanations of a sextant...who said you won't learn something on a Friday? Thanks Brian and crew!

Kiril & Brian: Right from the start I must say that you've given 'B-Roll' a whole new meaning....butt, I digress. :-P

I like you brought out your sextant. As a professional navigator I would say to only do Latitude from LAN. Secondly I would take sunlines at least and hour apart and not during noon because as the sun gets closer to the horizon the angles between the lines are bigger. So a more accurate fix. If I was on the forenoon watch I would take 3 in the morning an hour apart and take LAN depending on where I am in the time zone. Then reduce and advance each line to the time at LAN. It’s a lot of information for beginners but as you learn the skill this will make sense. Using a sextant is still one of the best things I learned. If your under 5 miles on a bouncy day that’s great. On a flat day. Being under a mile is perfection. Great video I hope y’all continue to learn celestial.

Taylor fits in so well it's almost like she was still on board with @Sailing Doodles. I swear you could drop her on any boat and Taylor will thrive.

It occurred to me Brian watching the bit where Kazza is playing with Nugget in her bunk that you guys are compiling the most amazing family album for Nugget as she grows up into adulthood. Not that I am wanting to wish her childhood away. Gave me a warm feeling inside. Family is everything and makes us what we are. Greg 🇬🇧

The view of the night sky on the open sea miles from the nearest artificial light must be spectacular. What is even more interesting is the stars can be and were used for navigation for millenia before the invention of the magnetic compass or the sextant.

The skipper is a genius! He always surrounds himself with young beautiful women

Been looking for sailing content like this, connecting astronomy and science to sailing. Thanks people.

There is something about a night sail, I think I prefer it to day sailing. You are usually alone with your thoughts but have a reason to be there. Mind you, in a gale in shipping traffic, not so much. Thanks for keeping me entertained during the short dark cold days in the northern Europe with the boat laid up.

Just came across you all a day ago while recovering from covid. After watching a couple episodes I felt like that feeling of being on a boat in my body as I was drifting off to sleep. Today I learned about the sextant from watching. Enjoy your adventures y’all!!!! Sincerely, Hero

Great episode and interesting sextant overview. I really like the lighting and camera angle of Taylor pulling in the sheet during the tack.

Hello all the Delos crew, good luck and safe sailing.i rellly enjoy your videos .Just beware of the Wild Coast off Transkei, South Africa, if you come this way in the future. Godblees all.Don ,South Africa.

Nice one to the Team SV Delos, Wish you all the Safety of Rough SEAS...

One of the best sailing channel for the scientific information provided .. keep the good work and have plenty of fun

Steering the ship by the stars must feel wonderful. You are doing something that hasn’t changed for millennia following the exact same stars on the same ocean that Nelsons navy would have traveled.

Ahoy Brian! Couple squibs (nothing witty, just like the sound of it) from Nebraska... We're up to 25 speakers, housed in 8 Klipsh cabinets, for our Marantz to play your theme over. Great sound! We turn it up every week. Thank you 😊 The changing sky is quite a "behold the hand of God" thing, especially dusk to dawn, when viewing in solitude. So nice to see a thing we greatly appreciate here in the "midwest sea" in your focus. Blessings and Peace ✌ 🙏

I had great fun teaching my son's 4th grade class on how to use a sextant. Learning that skill helps us understand the relationships and movements of celestial bodies. With a tray of water one can also use a sextant on land as was done on the Lewis and Clark expedition.

SV Delos illuminates the beauty of sailing. What an experience.

👍 good Brian for taking time to teach. Some, like Steve on Fair Isle, don't care to use a sextant or even have any paper charts aboard. His words, not mine. He only trust electronics. He will learn after a lighting strike at sea.

Great episode and nice training on the poor man’s GPS. This was an excellent lesson.

I love my buddaman sailcloth bag. Great construction quality and it’s perfect as a weekender bag or for me to jam all my foulies into for a sailing adventure.

I liked the celestial navigation segment. Plastic sextant and first timers; 26 miles off? I’d say you had very good results. Having used a high quality sextant in similar seas but on a 300 foot polar icebreaker, I was able to achieve a 1 mile variance on a relatively stable deck (the bottom of an icebreaker is shaped like a football .. doesn’t take much to get her rocking and rolling). Yourselves, on the other hand, on a 40 foot sailboat makes for a much more challenging task to chase the sun with any expectation of achieving useful results. Keep practicing! You will get better ... even with a plastic sextant.

Hay guys love what your doing out there 😉. I think I want a Saxton now. Lol. I hope I'm not too far behind time & have left things too late because I would love to own a piece of delos history. 😘 😘 😘. Keep up the good work delos people. Sv Kiwi Lady Opua Bay of islands New Zealand.

I am happy to see Brian teaching the crew how to use a sextant. The last major solar flare occurred in 1859 and took down the world's only significant electrical systems of the time, telegraphs. Some scientists say the earth is overdue for another major solar flare and others say one will happen in the next 100 years but there is concensus that it will happen. In contrast to the telegraph systems of 1859, a major solar flare in the 21st century will cause widespread disruption; it will lay waste to all the electronic devices in space and much of the ground based electronics as well as take the power grid and telecommunications networks down. Boats at sea will immediately lose GPS navigation and communications via Iridium, Intelstat, ViaSat and any other system that utilizes a satellite. Also the magnetic wave from the flare will make compasses unreliable. If their electronic components remain intact, SSB and VHF radios will be the only methods for boaters to communicate. Celestial navigation, aided by the centuries old sextant, will be sailors only option to find their way to port. The bottom line is anyone sailing in anything other than coastal waters or lakes should obtain a sextant and learn how to use it or risk being lost at sea! And bring paper charts with you. Brian and Kazza, it was great meeting you in. Annapolis! I'm already looking forward to next year. Keep up the great videos and above all STAY SAFE! ⛵❤️😷

This looks to be the funniest sail to anywhere I've ever watched...best fun I've had on dry land the Nugget is getting so big an tall. Thanks for sharing your lives with us and Fare winds an following sea's guy's✌🏻💗😊❣️

When ever I hear the Delos song in the intro it makes my heart glad, knowing I am about to go on another daily adventure with the Delos crew. I am so glad you have kept this song from the beginning. If you ever think about swapping it out, "Don't! It is iconic and truly apart of Delos. Love the videos and I have watch from the very beginning. Fair winds and may the sun always shine on your faces!

You sure know how to start a movie. This sailing biz looks brutal so far.

Have you read the book, “Longitude” by Dava Sobel? A fun read. The original ‘X Prize’. John Harrison’s clocks are still ticking in the Greenwich Observatory. I visited there after reading the book and spent most of my time there hanging with the clocks!

That was a cool video !! I really liked how you brought out the sexton device and had everyone take a turn to learn it. I think that everyone into boating the Ocean should learn how to use one. I also think you should bring that out more frequently with this crew until everyone can get within a 10 - 30 mile radius. Then teach all the newcomers onto Delos

You learn something every day, if you pay attention. If you're lucky you get a hunger for learning that lasts until your last breath.

Oh the beautiful Taylor and girls are becoming quite the sailors

Teaching your crew member to stare by the stars and the field of the helm was epic especially in this day and age! It worried me when you brought out the plastic sextant and everyone became confused. However, anyone who's captain ing a boat especially a sailboat should know how to use a sextant. That was so awesome that you exposed your crew to the traditional navigation skills. In a pinch on all power is down I can save lives. I'm hoping Brian has a stainless steel Sexton and his tool chest. I bet he does.

I did deliveries in the eighties and nineties. There was no gps, only SatNav which was unreliable, sometimes no fix for days. As the navigator I used celestial daily, conditions permitting. I NEVER bothered with a noon sight ever. I did a running fix using sun lines. One part you skipped which is critical for accuracy is accurate time. You get that off the time tick on sb. Also, we’d never just do one sight. We’d do about eight and use the average, tossing out the ones that were wildly different. (In big seas you’ll get bad sights sometimes, you have to hold on with your legs because it takes both hands) Back then few ships had gps as well so a meeting at sea gave the navigators a chance to check their math on the radio. We’d use our DR on top of our last fix to determine current position (adding in set and drift). Usually we’d be within a mile our our computed position when we compared notes. It was like a game everyone played. Eventually gps came down to $1500, which was a lot of money in ‘90, and I was replaced.

That bikini army you have assembled is absolutely terrifying!!!!!!

All the usual fun things in this video...and...navigation! and steering by stars! I think that was Antares in Scorpius lined up vertically with your mast in the steer by stars sequence. A very bright reddish star with a less bright star above and below a short distance. Antares being the heart of the scorpion in the middle of the body. Just a guess...don't take me as an authority. I recently had my own first experience steering by the stars. Caught me by surprise as we prepared to gybe and I wanted to hand steer a slow turn but couldn't see the water that is my usual guide....ta da! There were the stars to help me steer a smooth, slow gybing turn.

Rain... BATH TIME! That was indeed a gorgeous sky. Excellent piloting technique by the stars, Brian. I once flew for about four hours over the darkest and least-lit forests and swamps. We still had a hand-held GPS, but were often out of range of radio navigation. Spooky! But the stars kept us company, and it's a lot easier on the eyes, and senses, to track in the general direction of a constellation than to hold heading while also holding altitude and bank. Watching your celestial navigation class. I used to be our squadron's Cel Nav monitor, which means I had the dubious honor of recalculating and re-plotting all the other squadron navigators' semi-annual celestial training events. Fun! (not). You did good! However, when it comes to resetting chronometers before fixing your position, you're better off obtaining a latitude by Polaris, first, then noting the time when well-known E-W star or planet kisses the horizon. Then, assuming your clock can keep time to within a few seconds a day, (GPS clock... ha...) the rest of your sextant-shot positions will be more accurate. By the way, the distance between your observed and actual position is precisely 24.21823 nm. That's VERY nice shooting for a hand-held plastic sextant! Good fun! So fun watching the adventures!

Thank you Brian for teaching us some celestial navigation like my dad Jim or Sahib Jim tried to teach mom Memsahib Bettt and me back in the day.. my mom was a trooper and took navigator and captain courses with the Power Squadton.. he made Captain and Navigators license..mom who did it for dad really wanted to support him but she like me weren't into the math or super accuracy aspects of it. My dad and his English boss (they made top grade filter paper and the company at one point bought Chemex Coffee from an elderly couple and then sold it within weeks of Mr Coffees debut... dad and boss flew around the world stopping in many countries on one was India where he picked up the Sahib and Memsahib names ...few had flown on one trip around the world at that time. Dad was one of first days to fly Concode to England to see his boss. You have the sane kind of guts for navigation things but a gentler teaching way.. Still I think you would have liked him a Navy man and always lover of the sea. Thanks Brian and crew including Nugget for doing amazing living and enjoying life on the waves of the world ..

Love your channel and adventures. I really like the way Brian teaches his crew.

Always a pleasure. Keeps me calm at work!

Not bad with the sextant. Great to see people trying to keep up the old school practice which I learned back at the Maritime Academy and use at sea to keep my skills up :) Nice work

In celestial navigation the real accuracy comes from shooting multiple stars a little before sunrise or after sunset. Back in the old days before GPS or Loran you'd shoot & calculate a good fix in the morning, then use dead reckoning throughout the day. Pull an accurate latitude by shooting the sun at local apparent noon, and then correct the dead reckoning fix with an accurate evening fix. (And hoping that you'd have decent visibility most mornings/evenings to get angles on multiple stars with a good spread from different directions on the horizon.) With a good timepiece and quality sextant, practice and decent visibility you could cross the ocean and arrive on the other side with accuracy within a mile or two. Not bad! I was the navigator on a US naval ship in the 90s and we'd still break out the sextant and shoot the stars to stay in practice. Life as a surface warfare officer was very busy, so I didn't get the chance to do it personally as much as I would have liked but it was a fun diversion every so often!

I used to plot out missile debris, and test shots of artillery and such, on a test range. It was always about intersecting angles, and the more angles I was given (and it grew in time as my security clearance was enhanced), the more accurate I could plot impact. It was so much fun, probably the most fun I ever had at a job. The devil is in the details, I will leave them out. Suffice it to say, if I had a sextant back then, I might have walked outside and look for the 'smoke trail'. It would have helped a little.

Even, after the ball and chain, you still managed sirens for SV Delos, Impressive! And it's definitely not your unlimited wealth of monetary tangible economic prowess, but only known among us the Romantics. The Unattainable and perhaps only by adhering to the truest yearning of effort. To chase your Dream. My hats off to you sir, Captain Brian, not only you caught the Dream, but you also snatched the bright Star, that was ever so shining near the Constellation of Southern Cross. (It will be Acrux or Gacrux btw)

Wonderful days & Sea Adventures 🥰love to sail🥰

Brian Awesome teaching.....Never understood a Sextant until today....

26 miles off was good all things considered. And your right, it would help get out of a jam if the all else broke. A good start to celestial navigation instruction I’ve found to be: 1) The sun is always over some point on earth, right? 2) If you had a book that told you where that point was for every moment and 3) you took your sextant and discovered the sun was directly over your head 4) you’d know you were on that point. Next: 1) let’s say it’s local noon, on the exact moment of the equinox (so the sun in right over the equator ) and you’re on a boat sailing south towards the equator. You know you’re still in the northern hemisphere. 2) You take out your sextant and find the sun in 80 degrees above the southern horizon. 3) 90 - 80 =10 and 4) You now know your latitude is 10 degrees north This helps newbies in thinking about geography and basic ideas and keeps the logic and math simple at first.

Last comment, I'm celebrating a new 'job', if I want it. Delos has restored my faith in so many things. So thank you guys. I'm subscribed already. Next step is Patreon if I take the job. I love navigation also. So this was fun.

Great video gang. Kaza, great work with the camera. That piece when you're looking down at the dark blue water was fantastic. So many great things to say about this video. Love everyone of you, especially Nugget and her funny pull up. I laughed so hard! 💗💗💗💗💗 (this one is for Nugget) ❤️🥰

Ha ha ha! Nugget looks exhausted. I'm such a coward out at sea but with weather like this, who doesn't I want to be out there.

Never a dull moment every week and the new crew blends well aboard Delos. Thank you for the view and shares from my hometown vessel...youse guys rock!

Another day, another adventure! Love all of you! Peace!

Glad you tuned your crew in to the manual factors....Dependency on instruments can cancel out visual and audible awareness of what's really going on.neat episode!

Hand steering by the stars

Interesting-my former father inlaw knew how to follow the stars while he was in the service? An age old tradition. Amazing. ⭐️

I surprisingly enjoyed this video alot...its amazing how knowledgeable you are and that you share this knowledge with the crew, looking forward to more 💯👌🏼⛵

What an amazing time. You are blessed.

Nice to see my fave Canadian explorer among your crew.

wow - just realised i've watched 341 Delos vlogs - it's been a privilege, thank you Delossians

The 8:00 minute mark is great! What a beautiful day on the water.

Loved seeing some of the night sky from Delos. That is what i would love to see! Very interesting lesson with the sextant. So enjoyed this vlog.

I’ll bet the Cribbage queen wins the next game or 3. 😆 Great video guys and looking forward to the next!

I really liked the lessons in hand steering by the stars and your intro to shooting the sun! Thanks!

“Which ever direction the wind blows, that’s where I go.” Has a new meaning to me. It must be so liberating, yet frustrating.

You sir have THE best voice on RU-vid.

We see only 30% of fun. But there's lot of hardwork from B and K to keep the vessel on the move!

Today’s my birthday. I haven’t sleep yet I’m here warching delos on the first hour of November. Keep safe everyone ☺️🇵🇭

Beans on the voyage makes the trip more musical, they are also great conversation starters....lol

I’m so pleased to see you teaching celestial navigation. As a former Navigation instructor and one of the last classes in the Navy to learn Astro nav by first principles (ie. not using computer). This is cool!!!

This was a great segment I just loved it. You have had other videos with the Sextant it's great. As always may you all have a safe sail and the time of your life.

YES! As an amateur (wannabe) astronomer, I really wish you guys would make some high quality photos of the night sky from there on delos, on a clear night. The open ocean is one of the few places in the world where there is virtually no light pollution, apart from the light the ocean reflects. But i bet it's still far better than what you would see in your hometown. I live in Sweden, and the only way for me to get to a low-light area is to go north. Far north. This means I don't see the same sky that you would, sailing the equator, so I would strongly encourage you to look into getting some telescope with a compensating stand for ocean use. I would definitely consider donating to make this a reality and I'm sure many others in my circles would as well. Just try and search youtube for "night sky milkyway no light pollution" and prepare to be blown away by what you can (or cant) see, even though its right in front of your eyes your entire life.

I love episode 56 to 95 an 141 to 173. God bless sv delos.

Man I wish I could get that feeling of binge watching this entire channel over and over.

I learned how to "shoot stars" and "sunlines" in the Navy, and Brian you are right... it is definitely more of an art than it is a science. With star fixes, the tighter the triangle, the better the fix. And given that 1° of longitude (at your lattitude) is almost 60nm... you are 120nm off course, or essentially.... Lost At Sea! 😊