This is my latest paper published at Mathsoft on 12/3/2003 on vessel navigaztion. It discusses the effect magnetic deviation on a vessel compass and what to do about it. There are several effects on a boat that cause the magnetic compass not to point to true north. The first problem is that the Earth's magnetic poles are not aligned with the rotational axis of the Earth. The second problem is the boats magnetic field, which causes deviation.
A copy of the Mathcad-11 version of this document can be retrieved from the Mathcad Physics Libray at www.mathcad.com by click on " MagneticCompassDeviation-11.mcd." For those of you with earlier versions of mathcad, you can down load the mathcad 6 version from my web site and save it to disk from your Browser by clickin on MagneticCompassDeviation.mcd Then start mathcad and load the disk file you have just saved.
If you don't have a version of mathcad, a PDF version of this file is available at MagneticCompassDeviation.pdf on my web site.
