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On Thu, 30 Sep 2004, George Huxtable wrote:

> Alex wrote-
> The Russian manual says about "a plate with machine oil
> which an assistant holds in his hands".
> The assistant is probably needed
> to absorb the vibration of the ship's engine!
>
> Tell us more, please, Alex.
> I find it hard to believe that any assistant
> could have steady enough hands to hold a liquid horizon

The sentence inside the quotation marks is what the manual says.
(The next sentence was my own speculation.)
The passage in the manual on the artificial horiaon begins with
"If the horizon is not visible, altitudes can be taken with
artificial horizon..."
The manual I refer to is a little book in Russian:

by Kondrashikhin and Rakhovetskii,
"Astronomical determinations of the ship position and of
the compass correction"

which I bought in 1967 and read
so carefully that I can cite it by heart even now.
Unfortunately the book was lost when I was moving to the US.

But I am confident that I cite the passages from it correctly.

> I havent come across an
> account of any successful measurement made with an
> artificial horizon on
> board a ship at sea.

Nest time I travel on a ferry and have my sextant with me
I will try.

> If
> that was a standard Russian procedure, it would be
> interesting to learn about it.

I don't see how to verify this at this moment. It is possible
that the procedure was intended for observations from the ice,
on icebreakers. I definitely remember reading (in another
book)
that such observations from the ice were routine. Even remember
seeing pictures...

Alex.

   

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