RYA Yachtmaster Ocean

Meridian Passage

RYA Yachtmaster Ocean Theory Course

Meridian Passage Page 1 of 10
Tiller School 2004 Yachtmaster Ocean Course Version 07 - i
Meridian Passage Sights
Or working out our Latitude
What will I learn in this lecture?
This lecture will show you how to forecast the time of Meridian Passage and how to reduce a Meridian
Passage sight to derive our latitude. It covers topic 5 of the RYA syllabus.
You will need to have studied Lectures 1 and 2 before starting this topic.
Working on this topic
Work through the Tiller notes and Chapter 3 of 'Ocean Sailing before completing and submitting RYA
exercise 3.
Suggested time
Based on the RYA syllabus we suggest you allow about two hours plus time for the RYA exercise.

Finding your way around this lecture
CHAPTER 1 - MERIDIAN PASSAGE SIGHTS.......................................................................................................... 2
CHAPTER 2 - MERIDIAN PASSAGE - THE SIMPLE SIGHT................................................................................ 3
WORKING OUT OUR LATITUDE .......................................................................................................................................3
DECLINATION.................................................................................................................................................................3
THREE STEPS TO A SIGHT - PLAN, EXECUTE, CALCULATE.................................................................................................4
PLANNING THE SIGHT......................................................................................................................................................4
SEXTANT WORK ..............................................................................................................................................................5
CALCULATION................................................................................................................................................................5
SOME EXAMPLES.............................................................................................................................................................6
NOW LET'S TRY A REAL SIGHT.........................................................................................................................................6
CHAPTER 3 - MORE ON SIGHTS............................................................................................................................... 7
IMPROVING THE ACCURACY OF TIMING MER. PASS.........................................................................................................7
SIGHT FORMS..................................................................................................................................................................8
CHAPTER 4 - ANSWERS............................................................................................................................................. 10

RYA Yachtmaster Ocean Theory Course

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Tiller School 2004 Yachtmaster Ocean Course Version 07 - i
Chapter 1 - Meridian Passage Sights
We are very close to being able to work out our latitude using the traditional noon sight. You may have
read about the old clipper ships or sailing men of war and how all officers would line up on the poop to
shoot the sun and work out the ships latitude.
The navigator is aiming to measure the greatest altitude of the sun. It is the moment at which it stops rising
and starts falling or, to be precise, when the sun crosses the navigators meridian (of longitude) from East to
West (hence the name Meridian Passage) and the sight is taken at approximately 12:00 LOCAL time.
It is an easy sight and all we need to know is the True Altitude of the sun, its direction (North or South) when
we took the observation and the suns declination. Lecture 4 tells you how to work out declination but heres
the concept. We know that the sun moves over a year and in European latitudes, as an example, our
summer coincides with the period of the year that the suns position is in the N hemisphere. Its declination
has a Northerly value. During the Northern Hemispheres winter the sun has a Southerly declination and, at t
Once you have completed this lecture you will be able to navigate using astro navigation in the way that our
forebears did. They could work out latitude without an accurate knowledge of time. You will be in a stronger
position because we routinely measure time more accurately (an electronic wristwatch) than they could
dream of. This allows us to work out our longitude to within a few miles and all this on the basis of one sun
sight.
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Tiller School 2004 Yachtmaster Ocean Course Version 07 - i
Chapter 2 - Meridian Passage - the Simple Sight
Working out our Latitude
Enough of theory - let's try finding our latitude with a sun sight. This is the tried and trusted technique used
since time immemorial. You may have heard of the old sailing ships 'running down their Easting' or Westing.
Before the invention of accurate chronometers longitude was a huge problem for the ship's navigator and the
East - West position of a ship would be worked out, in essence, by Dead Reckoning. Hence, perhaps, the
origins of this term?!
It was necessary to remove one element of uncertainty. Many a captain would sail to the latitude of his
destination and then go East or West on that latitude until they reached port. There were pitfalls of course,
such as prolonged periods of cloudy weather, but this is such an easy sight to take and work out that it should
be part of any navigators repertoire.
It's a good starting point for us because we move from the realms of the academic to a useful, usable and
practical sight for anyone with even a basic sextant (or indeed any means of measuring the sun's angle
relative to the observer's horizon).
If you have been to a maritime museum you may have seen a variety of predecessors to the sextant. It is said
that many a captain or navigator had a secret mark on his equipment to mark the latitude of a secret island or
even, perhaps, treasure.
This sight is one of the few that does NOT demand that we know the time of the sight although if we know it
we can derive additional information about our position.
If our goal is to measure LATITUDE only, then all we need to know is the rough time of our local
midday and go and sit on deck with a sextant and wait till the sun stops rising!
If we want to spend less time on deck we need to plan the sight and become better informed about the
time of midday locally to us.
If we want to make a stab at LONGITUDE we need to measure the time of Meridian Passage (Mer. Pass)
as accurately as we possibly can. There are tricks to help us with this.
Declination
Before we can progress we need to know a little about calculating the declination of a body. Well use the
sun but the principles apply to all bodies.
?? Open the RYA booklet at page 13 and find the column for the sun. It has two values and the first is
the GHA or Greenwich Hour Angle. We do not require this for a straightforward Mer. Pass sight.
The second is labelled Dec for declination. Look at it more closely now and we find:
The declination is NAMED - South in the case of February.
The value for declination changes hour by hour and in February it is decreasing.
?? Would we expect this and why?
1

The rate of change for the three days (tri day) represented by February 24
th
to 26
th
is 0.9 per hour.
The value of d at the bottom of the column is 0.9. This gives us a clue. d is the average rate of change
for the body in question over a given tri day. In the J une excerpts it is 0.0 as the sun reaches its most
northerly point and stops before sliding south again.
There are tables to help us work out the declination on a minute by minute basis and they are in the
increments and corrections section on RYA pages 20 to 23. ?? Look at page 20 now.
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Find the columns marked v or d corrn for 28 minutes and work down the v or d columns till you find our
value of 0.9. The correction to apply is given as 0.4.
Does this make sense?
Yes, if the declination is changing by 0.9 per hour then at 28 minutes past the hour we would expect it to be
about midway and since we never work to a better accuracy than 0.1 a value of 0.4 is right for 28 minutes.
Do we add or subtract the correction for v or d?
Its a good question and sometimes you will find a minus sign but more often than not the tabulated value
will be unsigned. The solution is straightforward. Remember that v or d is the difference between
successive values of, in our case at the moment, declination.
Theres a simple and infallible rule - if the value (of declination) is increasing then d is positive and we
ADD the correction. If it is decreasing then it is negative and we subtract it.
Simple really but this is a cause of lots of errors. All you have to do is inspect the tables and apply a sanity
check on which way the value is changing.
?? Predict the correction for 35 minutes then see if the tables bear out your estimate?
2

This is a very simple piece of interpolation and it can often be done in your head or with a calculator. The
tables are quick and easy and there if you need them.
?? Work out the declination of the sun at 11:30 UT on February 25
th
?
3

Now that we can handle declination we can move on to the Meridian Passage sight.
Three steps to a sight - plan, execute, calculate
Lets concentrate on the basics and consider a sun sight.
Plan the sight
For us, with the sun, this means finding the UT of our local Meridian Passage.
1. Obtain it from tables for the day in question. They tell us the LOCAL time of Mer. Pass. To be useful we
have to correct it to UT and use that time to plan the sight. We will have a ships clock set to UT but it is
unlikely that we will have one set to exactly the correct LMT - at best it will be set to zone time.
2. Adjust the time of local Mer. Pass for effects of longitude to get UT Mer. Pass.
?? How would you do this?
4

Take the sight
Normal sextant procedures.
Calculate
Latitude (and Longitude).
Planning the sight
1. Extract the time of Mer. Pass for the day from the Nautical Almanac (for February look on page 13 of
the RYA booklet at the bottom right - you will see Mer. Pass entries for the sun and the moon. There are
similar ones for other months - take a look at pages 14 to 17 now).
Note that the time of local midday (i.e. local Mer. Pass) changes by about 20 minutes over the 6 months
spanned by the RYA data.
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2. From estimated longitude add/subtract the appropriate time to get Mer. Pass UT.
e.g. Mer. Pass 12h 14m, Long 15 W, UT Mer. Pass =12h 14m PLUS 1 hour =13h 14 min.
3. This gives us the approximate sight time. In practice we would start tracking the sun several minutes
before this - the amount depending on the accuracy of our DR longitude.
??Try it.
1. June 21, DR is 34 31 W - when is UT Mer. Pass?
5

2. February 26, DR is 69 6 E - when is UT Mer. Pass?
6

Sextant work
There are no surprises here - work methodically and all should be well:
1. Take the sight.
2. Record SA and note Name (direction) of sight North or South.
3. Note TIME of sight.
4. If youve taken a series select the best sight to be used.
5. Work out the TRUE ALTITUDE.
Calculation
This is our first sight reduction so read what follows in conjunction with pages 20 to 23 of Ocean Sailing.
You will find their diagrams on pages 29 and 30 of particular value when working through the notes that
follow. The theory is described first and below it you will find some worked examples to help you.
?? Find them now.
The calculation is very straightforward and the steps are as follows:
1. Subtract TA from 90 degrees to get the ZD (see Astro Theory if a refresher on ZD).
2. Reverse the NAME of the sight from North to South or vice versa.
3. Work out declination and note name (N / S):
Remember to apply d correction.
4. Algebraically add the declination:
Same names - ADD.
Contrary names - SUBTRACT smaller from greater - name as greater.
5. Apply common-sense to the answer - you probably know which hemisphere you are in!
6. Result =latitude.
If you prefer to plug numbers into formulae then Ocean Sailing follows that approach. The sight form in
your Form Pack follows the steps outlined above.
Longitude
This all depends on the accuracy of the sight timing and our knowledge of UT.
Remember that:
There are 4 minutes of time per degree of longitude This equates to 4 seconds of time per mile at the
equator and about 3 at 50 latitude (because the distance between meridians of longitude has decreased).
If we can time local Mer. Pass to within about 4 seconds we can calculate our longitude to the nearest
mile or so. This is pretty good and only needs an accurate watch - a 2 or 3 commodity item.
There are tricks to help make this timing more accurate - the problem being that the exact point at which
the sun starts to 'fall' is hard to determine.
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Some examples
First some simple ones using whole numbers of degrees. By stripping out the minutes we can focus on the
principles involved.
Dec. 20 N, T Alt 60 S (i.e. the sextant was pointing to the South when the sight was taken).
ZD =N 30 (90 - 60 and reverse sign). Lat. =50 N.

Dec. 20 N, T Alt 40 N.
ZD =S 50 (90 - 40 and reverse sign), Lat. =30 S.
Now for a more realistic example:
Declination N 23 17.6, True Alt S 68 29.6 (from observer).
ZD (90 - TA) N 21 30.4 (reverse sign).
Lat. N 44 48.0 (ZD +Decl; same names so add).
?? Try it
1. Dec. 19 N, T Alt 51 30 S What is the latitude?
7

2. Dec. 11 S, T Alt 61 49 S What is the latitude?
8


Now let's try a real sight
Sight forms are very useful in ordering ones thoughts but we have found that, at this stage, it is better to
make you work without one. It helps you understand WHAT you are doing and WHY. Theres a section on
sight forms at the end of the lecture.
First step is to work out the UT of Mer. Pass. The information we need is:
Sept. 22nd, DR 50 N, 7 01W.
?? Work out UT Mer. Pass now.
9

Sight details are that the LL of the sun was observed. SA 46 42.1 bearing South, IE -3.0, Ht of eye 3m at
12h 28m 15s UT.
?? Work out the TA now.
10

The next step is to work out the ZD dont forget to name it correctly.
?? Work out the ZD now.
11

We now need to find the suns declination.
?? Work out the declination and, again, remember to name it.
12

?? And finally calculate the Latitude.
13

We can make a Longitude estimate and the procedure equates time to angular distance. The steps are:
1. Time of sight 12h 28m 15s UT.
2. Mer. Pass 11h 53m.
3. Long in time 00h 35m 15s =08 48.5 W.
The conversion is made by using the arc to time table or increments and corrections if you have the right
information. The difference will normally be a few miles at most.
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Chapter 3 - More on Sights
We know that the sun has a local time of meridian passage. This is obtained from the Nautical Almanac.
For navigational purposes we have to convert it to UT and for this we need a DR so we can convert the LMT
Mer. Pass to UT Mer. Pass.
?? What is UT Mer. Pass of the sun in position 25 00N and 58 17W on February 24th 1980?
14

?? If longitude is East what do we do?
15

The process is similar with other bodies such as the planets.
?? Consider Venus. On 25 Feb. 1980 what was its UT Mer. Pass in position 50 06N 17 34W?
16

It is often desirable to preset the sextant so we can more easily find the body - this is especially valuable
if we are trying to find it quickly with a less than ideal horizon or in rough weather.
We always want to predict the likely SA before taking the sextant on deck for the stars and planets. The
exception is the sun and moon which are big and easy to find in the sextants telescope.
The way to do this is to reverse the Mer. Pass latitude calculation. Lets take the example above, assume
an IE of -3.2 and dip of -2.8 and work through the process.
There are five steps to follow:
1. Find declination of body at UT Mer. Pass.
2. Find ZD of body and reverse its sign.
3. Subtract DR lat. to get True Alt.
4. Reverse apply necessary corrections to get App Alt.
5. Calculate SA by backing out IE and Dip.
?? Try solving the Venus problem now.
17

This is really all there is to the meridian passage sight. Before you work on the RYA exercise there are a
couple of other topics to consider.
Improving the accuracy of timing Mer. Pass
When the observed body is close to Mer. Pass its rate of rise or fall is very slow. This makes the sight easy to
take because the body will appear to hover briefly and there is plenty of time to adjust the sextant to get an
accurate sight.
The problem is that this makes it difficult to determine the exact time of Mer. Pass. An error of a few seconds
is easy to make and will introduce a significant error into the longitude.
Those of you who used the old RDF receivers or who have tried a handbearing compass in rough seas will
probably have guessed the solution:
1. Take the TIME and Sextant Altitude a few minutes BEFORE local noon.
2. Take the Sextant Altitude at Meridian Passage and your best estimate of the time.
3. Reset the sextant to its value in action 1 and take the TIME at which the suns altitude falls to that taken
in the first sight.
The exact TIME of Meridian Passage is going to be half the difference between sights one and three added to
the TIME of sight 1.
Simple if there aren't any clouds! It should give a worthwhile increase in the accuracy of the calculated
longitude - provided that you know the error in your watch. In practice one would probably take two or three
'rising' sights and matching 'falling' sights to minimise the risks of a wrong reading from the sextant, cloud
obscuring the sun etc.
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This type of sight is fine if we can see the sun at its Meridian passage. It is of no use if we miss the Mer.
Pass, are unhappy with its accuracy, or want to establish a more accurate position by taking sun sights at any
time other than LMT Mer. Pass. We cover the general use of sun sights in a later lecture.
Sight Forms
Youll have realised by now that even this relatively simple sight involves several steps:
1. We have to calculate the True altitude from the Sextant altitude.
2. Work out the time and Greenwich Date.
3. Perform a calculation to obtain the answer we want - in this case the latitude.
Sight forms are no more than simple pro-formas that:
Guide the work.
Apply a logical sequence to minimise reference to tables.
Extracting information from tables is quite error prone and on a moving yacht we should aim to
extract all relevant information in one go if we can. The sight form can help.
Reduce errors as far as possible.
Prompt for all necessary data and calculation.
Most people find that sight forms are an invaluable help in avoiding errors. Your Form Pack has some
examples and there are others on the reverse of the plotting sheets (separate pad). Also check the Tiller CD.
Alternatively why not design your own? Sight forms are intended to help YOU. They should reflect the way
you work and, in designing one, you will find that it makes you concentrate on the steps in the calculation.
?? We suggest that you make up a sight form for Meridian Altitude sights - do it on a computer or
simply rough it out on a piece of paper - before you look at ours. Theres a copy overleaf and a slightly
updated version in your Form Pack. Youll also find several sight forms on the reverse of the plotting
sheets we supply.

?? Now you can complete and submit RYA Exercise 3.
(To help you check your working the answer to question 4 is 49 43.5 N)

You should then go to the lecture on Sun Sights and Plotting


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Chapter 4 - Answers

1
Because February is mid Winter in the N hemisphere so the sun is going to be south of the equator. December 22
nd
is the shortest
day in the N hemisphere and the days then get longer as the sun starts its long passage north again. Declination will be at its
highest N value in J une and in September (and March) it will be roughly zero as the sun crosses the equator. Check it now on
RYA pages 15 and 17.
2
35 minutes is a little more than half way through the hour so we would expect a value of 0.5 or possibly 0.6. On page 23 the table
shows it to be 0.5
3
Declination at 11:00 on Feb 25th is S 9 18.7 DECREASING. d is 0.9 so declination at 11:30 UT will be S 9 18.2.
4
By using the arc to time conversion table and checking for GD as well.
5
J une 21 Mer. Pass is 12h 02 mins (page 15 of RYA). Arc to time conversion of 34 31'.W is 2h 18m 04s so time of Mer. Pass is
14h 20m.
6
Mer. Pass is 12h 13m. Arc to time for 69 6'.0 E is 4h 36m. UT Mer. Pass for this longitude 07h 37m.
7
ZD =38 30 N, Lat. =57 30 N.
8
ZD =28 11 N, Lat. =17 11 N.
9
UT Mer. Pass calculation:
Sight Mer. Pass 11h 53m.
7 01W 28m 04s.
UT Mer. Pass 12h 21m.

10
True Altitude calculation:
SA 46 42.1 S
IE - 3
Dip - 3.1
AA 46 36.0
Corr'n + 15.1
TA 46 51.1 S
11
Calculating the ZD involves subtracting the TA from 90 and reversing the name:
ZD 43 08.9 N
12
Declination is obtained from the tables and we must apply time corrections to it:
Declination 0 08.9 N
d - 0'.5
Declination 0 08.4 N
13
Latitude - names are the same for declination and ZD so add them:
Latitude is 43 17.3 N
14
LMT Mer. Pass from table is 12h 13m. 58 17W converts to 3h 53m 08s (RYA page 19). UT Mer. Pass is therefore 16h 06m.
15
SUBTRACT time converted to arc from LMT Mer. Pass.
16
LMT Mer. Pass is 14h 49m
17 34W equates to 1h 10m
UT Mer. Pass is 15h 59m
17
We are working backwards to establish the SA so all corrections have to have their sign reversed:
Declination Venus at 16h 00m is N 07 35.5 (d is 1.3 and can be ignored for this UT Mer. Pass and the accuracy of the
calculation we are performing).
The declination of Venus is therefore N 07 35.5
Latitude N 50 06
Declination N 07 35.5
ZD N 42 30.5
TA 90 - 42 30.5 S 47 29.5 Reverse name.
Alt corrn + 0.9 AA corrn - remember to reverse the sign since we are working backwards!
Venus corrn -- 0.1
AA S 47 30.3
SA Apply the applicable IE and dip in reverse.