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A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Using any star for a lunar
From: Jim Thompson
Date: 2005 Mar 12, 06:41 -0400
From: Jim Thompson
Date: 2005 Mar 12, 06:41 -0400
I am undoubtedly revealing my failure to spend enough time learning lunars (my limp defense is that it is still bloody cold around here at night), but can any navigational star or planet be used to work a lunar distance, as long as the altitudes of the body and moon are within the window for a given method? I know the old Almanacs had lunar distance data for only a few selected stars, and I think that Frank's online calculator has solutions for some selected stars, but can I just go outside, shoot a set of sights between the moon and a convenient body, and then come back indoors to reduce the sight? Or do I have to select from a short list of nagivational bodies? I have a run of sights on a star from last fall, taken with chilled but not frozen fingers, but I recall that when I tried to do a preliminary reduction using Frank's online calculator, that star was not available. What am I missing? Jim Thompson www.jimthompson.net -------------------- Outgoing email scanned by Norton Antivirus
