Guy Murchie (1907 - 1997) was an author, journalist and flight instructor who taught navigation during WWII. Murchie was an early FOCF (Friend of Cold Fusion), and a friend of Eugene Mallove, and a mensch.
I recommend his book "Song of the Sky" (1954) which is mainly about navigation. The entire book is on the web: http://archive.org/stream/songofsky00murc/songofsky00murc_djvu.txt Here are some wonderful quotes about Ptolemaic astronomy. This should be food for thought to a theorist: . . . Ptolemy himself must have been a demon at puzzles, for he tackled some of the greatest in the world, and his work on the foundations of trigonometry and on star movements was so good that no man surpassed it for 1400 years. . . . However, the most remarkable thing about Ptolemy's work is that so much of it is still standard today, especially in elementary celestial navigation. Inevitably Ptolemaic astronomy is archaic, provincial and very limited in perspective. It is astronomy as looked at by the earth lubber who has not yet journeyed in his imagination to the sun or beyond. Ptolemy had almost no idea of where or what or how big the sun is. Yet his basic calculations are the most convenient ever devised for navigation. They are a representation of the apparent movements of the sun, moon, planets, and "fixed" stars. And they make practical sense too, for even after you learn the larger, simpler view that the earth and planets revolve around the sun, it is still true (relatively speaking) that all the celestial bodies revolve around the earth. To a practical navigator remaining on the earth, it is a lot easier to let it go at that and keep the old simple earth view, the view expounded in Leonardo da Vinci's down-to-earth advice that "small rooms or dwellings set the mind in the right path, large ones cause it to go astray." . . . - Jed
