NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Re: Air navigation 1950s-1980s
From: Art Leung
Date: 2026 Aug 17, 10:14 -0700
From: Art Leung
Date: 2026 Aug 17, 10:14 -0700
I have had great success with a variety of Kollsman periscopic sextants. I have gotten mine off eBay for around $120. I find that the 2-minute averagers, both mechanical clockwork and electronic, work very well but they tend to have dry bubble chambers or degraded pellicles. Bill Morris has an article on how to fix up the pellicles (I prefer the plastic cling wrap method) and he published a writeup I did on filling the Kollsman bubble chambers (Refilling a Kollsman Bubble Chamber – a guest post by Arthur Leung | The Nautical Sextant).
I put mine on top of a tripod.and regularly shoot Sun, Moon, planets, and stars while being a couple of hundred nautical miles from a sea horizon.
