Sailing by the Stars:

Compass Error by
Amplitude — Celestial
Navigation
Alistair Baillie

Despite modern technology one of the many

traditional seamanship skills that all
navigators need to maintain is checking the
vessel’s compass accuracy (or Compass
Error as it’s referred too) regularly using the
stars, planets, moon or the Sun.

In this article that accompanies my YouTube

video series, I’ll explain how to quickly check
the compass error via the Amplitude
method at sunrise or sunset.

Difference between Amplitude

and Azimuth

Whereas the Azimuth Method of

determining compass error can be used at
any time of the day or night, the Amplitude
Method provides a simpler and much faster
calculation with the downside being that it’s
only possible when the body being
observed is situated on the celestial horizon.

For this reason, it is only practical to use the

Amplitude Method with the Sun or on very
clear nights with a clearly defined horizon
the moon can also be used.

Celestial Horizon

Due to the curvature of the earth, the

Celestial Horizon is not the same as the
visible horizon.

The Sun is deemed to be on the Celestial

Horizon when it’s lower limb is located 2/3
of its diameter above the visible horizon.

The Moon is deemed to be on the Celestial

Horizon when it’s upper limb is touching the
visible horizon. As this would only give you a
few seconds it’s normally preferable to only
use the Amplitude with the Sun.

Taking the Observation

The first step in calculating our compass

error is to take an observed bearing of the
celestial body, traditionally this would have
been done with an azimuth ring on the
vessels’ magnetic compass but on modern
vessels with gyro-compasses, it’s more
common to be taken using a bridge wing
gyro repeater with sight.

This method will give us the vessels gyro

error which we can then use to calculate the
vessels’ magnetic compass error if desired.

It’s important that we take our observed

bearing as accurately as possible, we also
need to record the exact time we have taken
our bearing to the nearest second — the
most common method of ensuring the time
is accurate is to use the clock on a GPS unit
but you can use whatever timekeeping
system you have onboard.

Lastly, we also need to know the position of

our vessel at the time the observation was
taken.

If you also wish to calculate the vessels’

magnetic compass error we need to record
the gyro and magnetic compass headings at
this time.

The Calculation

I’m going to show the calculation using an

example, in this case, we’re calculating the
gyrocompass error using an amplitude of
the Sun and we’ll make use of a Pro-forma I
created to match my video series which can
be downloaded as a PDF from here.

After filling in the known information, which

is our ship’s position, gyro heading,
observed bearing of the sun and the
date/time of our observation converted to
UTC (all celestial calculations are carried out
relative to UTC / GMT).

Pro-forma and initial example data

We only need one piece of additional

information which is the declination of the
Sun at the given time. In order to obtain this,
we need to use a nautical almanac. The
photo below shows the appropriate daily
page from the 2016 British Admiralty
Nautical Almanac.

Admiralty Nautical Almanac Daily Page for 9th of April

2016

Looking down the Sun column we can find

that the declination for 20:18 on the 9th of
April 2016 is North 7 degrees, 57.9 minutes,
and we can see that the declination between
20:00 and 21:00 is increasing.

We now have a correction to apply to this

declination value, to obtain the correction
we need to make a note of the ‘d’ value
which is shown at the bottom of the column
in the Nautical Almanac, which in this case
is 0.9.

With this information we need to turn to the

yellow coloured pages in our British Nautical
Almanac which contain “Increments and
Corrections” and locate the page for 18
minutes, we then locate our ‘d’ value of 0.9
in the “v/d corr” column. This gives us a
correction value of 0.3.

We said that the declination between 20:00

and 21:00 was increasing, therefore we add
this 0.3 onto our original 20:00 declination
value giving us our correct declination for
20:18 of North 7 degrees, 58.2 minutes.

Increment and Corrections Page with Pro-forma

completed

Amplitude Formula

We now have all the information we need to

work out the true bearing of the Sun using
the amplitude formula.

Amplitude = SIN-1 ( SIN Declination /

COS Latitude )

If we enter this into any scientific calculator

you’ll get the answer of 8.9, we also need to
name it, as our declination was North and
the Sun was setting we name it North 8.9
West which to be useful to us we convert to
a true bearing by adding it to 270, giving us
a true bearing of 278.9 degrees.

Completed Pro-forma

To convert our amplitude to a true bearing

we use the helpful table on the Pro-forma. If
it had been sunrise and our amplitude was
named North 8.9 East then we would
subtract the 8.9 from 90.

Completing the Compass Error

The final step if we are working out our

compass error is to compare the observed
bearing of the Sun we took earlier with our
calculated true bearing of the Sun. The
difference between these is our gyro
compass error.

In the case of our example, our gyro error is

0.1 degrees high.