NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Re: Real accuracy of the method of lunar distances
From: Frank Reed CT
Date: 2004 Jan 12, 16:17 EST
From: Frank Reed CT
Date: 2004 Jan 12, 16:17 EST
Fred you wrote:
"I mentioned star-star distance
measurements to John Luykx of Navtrak Nauticals (he passed away last
year, was a Pres of the navigation foundation, American) as a method of
determining eccentricity and other "uncorrectable" sextant errors.
John said he thought it might take upwards of 500 observations or sets
of observations to assemble enough data. It would be tough. "
Why do you suppose he thought that? Maybe he was wrong. Have you tried star-star sights yourself?
Another other nice thing about star-star sights is that they give us information about the navigator's limits. If you do a series of these on some specific pair of stars, and you end up with a scatter of errors in the cleared distances, that scatter places a useful limit on all other sextant observations you make.
Frank E. Reed
[X] Mystic, Connecticut
[ ] Chicago, Illinois
"I mentioned star-star distance
measurements to John Luykx of Navtrak Nauticals (he passed away last
year, was a Pres of the navigation foundation, American) as a method of
determining eccentricity and other "uncorrectable" sextant errors.
John said he thought it might take upwards of 500 observations or sets
of observations to assemble enough data. It would be tough. "
Why do you suppose he thought that? Maybe he was wrong. Have you tried star-star sights yourself?
Another other nice thing about star-star sights is that they give us information about the navigator's limits. If you do a series of these on some specific pair of stars, and you end up with a scatter of errors in the cleared distances, that scatter places a useful limit on all other sextant observations you make.
Frank E. Reed
[X] Mystic, Connecticut
[ ] Chicago, Illinois
