NavList:

Greg wrote:

 

Usually you'll pre-compute elevations and azimuths of stars *before*
doing the sights, and then point the sextant accordingly (it's usually
pretty obvious what star you're looking for, just look for the
brightest object in the sextant's field of view... ;-)).

 

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This is correct, except when the cloud cover doesn't cooperate with the pre-computed stars and you are left shooting whatever you can see.  I have had this happen several times at sea, when the only stars I could shoot were none of the ones I wanted to shoot. 

 

To combat this, I recorded the approximate azimuth as well as altitude.  Fortunately I was still shooting major stars and was able to find them on my star finder.  If they had been minor stars, I probably would have taken the easy way out and just not reduced them (this was all before I had computers for this kind of work).

 

JCA

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