ezSights Celestial Navigation app good for
Ezsights is very easy to use.
Get you Position in no-time.
Very nice App, forget about stuffing your bags with tons of books.
On first sight looks interesting. Unfortunately, there is missing the possibility to set preferences e.g. °Celsius instead of Fahrenheit, or meters for height instead of feet.
It is hard to find a good software to support working with a sextant nowadays. EzCelestical is really easy to use, if you are a little familiar how to operate a sextant. It provides comprehensive information to prepare, record and review you measurements and to come to good result very quickly.
i have used 2 apps before I found this app for celestial navigation. This is by far the most user friendly one. Also the graphics are very good and app interface is very nice and simple.
Some bad moments
Very accurate and easy.
I would love to see support for sighting of the celestial objects
using iPad on board HD camera to replace a need for Sextant.
I use Spyglass instead of Sextant and got my first fix at .4NM radius. Not bad at all......
Ive never done celestial before. This was very easy to use and learn when combined with the instructions on the web site. Like the other review said, use this with the Spyglass App and you dont even need a sextant for reasonable accuracy. I could reliably get a fix within 5 NM each time while in a rolling boat on a windy lake. That should be close enough to find an island. I could see this being a possible emergency backup for use in case of equipment failure to get you there as long as you had a solar charger for your iPod.
Long been interested in the basics of astro navigation. I got a bit confused at first but their website has all the details of how to use.
This is a fun way to do serious stuff. I am a beginner and I really like this app.
Ive always wanted to learn how to use a sextant and now that I have enlisted in the USCG I thought it was time I learned.
After fumbling around with calculations and never quite getting the concept I found ezsights and quickly began taking sights around my small town with use of an artificial horizon. It takes a few minutes to learn the UI but once I did getting a sight was extremely simple. I would definitely recommend ezsights to anyone want to learn how to use a sextant.
This program offers great capabilities for supporting celestial navigation, but it is somewhat hard to learn to use.
In my first hour of trying to use this application, without reading any documentation, I could not succeed in entering two sights I wanted to reduce, and no ways that seemed intuitive to me actually worked. In contrast, when I first tried to use the USSPS Celestial Tools PC program I was able to enter sights right away, reduce the sights, and get a fix. Because I felt that an iPhone app should not be so hard to use, I wrote a caustic negative review.
The EZ Sights support personnel wrote me a very helpful email in response to my review, and gave me some help on what I needed to do to enter sights.
I have now used EZ Sights to enter sights, reduce sights, and compute fixes. The program does what I want, and I am now happy with its capabilities. It even has the capability to estimate longitude and get a fix from meridian transit observations alone (Use the "Best Fit Method").
In short, I now view this application as having excellent capabilities, but a somewhat hard to learn interface. Expect to need to study documentation (not built into the program) before you can even enter a sight and reduce it. If you are as old with computers as I am, its reminiscent of learning the idiosyncratic interface of an old, but excellent, DOS program. Once you learn how to use it, it is a good program, and offers good capabilities, especially for the price.
I intend to communicate privately with the EZ Sights personnel to offer some suggestions, so that this otherwise excellent program will become more intuitive to use in the future.
Brian Stipak, Portland Oregon, S/V Ubiquity
