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A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Re: What do stars look like in your eye?
From: Frank Reed CT
Date: 2004 Apr 25, 18:18 EDT
From: Frank Reed CT
Date: 2004 Apr 25, 18:18 EDT
Re using shades when shooting Venus, Ken M wrote:
"What a difference it made. They're also tremendous for reducing the brightness of the moon when using stars."
Yes, exactly. A couple of the "classic" lunars stars are rather faint. There's almost no way to use them for lunars unless you reduce the Moon's brightness. Keep in mind that you have yet another source of error here. Those shades rarely get used and you won't know until you experiment whether they're a problem. I have a Davis plastic sextant which I like very much and use for sights often, but the shades introduce errors of a half a minute of arc or more. If you can find just the right object, you can try to get an index correction with the various shades in the light path.
Frank E. Reed
[ ] Mystic, Connecticut
[X] Chicago, Illinois
"What a difference it made. They're also tremendous for reducing the brightness of the moon when using stars."
Yes, exactly. A couple of the "classic" lunars stars are rather faint. There's almost no way to use them for lunars unless you reduce the Moon's brightness. Keep in mind that you have yet another source of error here. Those shades rarely get used and you won't know until you experiment whether they're a problem. I have a Davis plastic sextant which I like very much and use for sights often, but the shades introduce errors of a half a minute of arc or more. If you can find just the right object, you can try to get an index correction with the various shades in the light path.
Frank E. Reed
[ ] Mystic, Connecticut
[X] Chicago, Illinois
