NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Re: Best way to record time for solo sights
From: Gary LaPook
Date: 2016 Feb 13, 20:53 +0000
From: Bill Lionheart <NoReply_Lionheart@fer3.com>
To: garylapook@pacbell.net
Sent: Friday, February 12, 2016 3:08 AM
Subject: [NavList] Re: Best way to record time for solo sights
From: Gary LaPook
Date: 2016 Feb 13, 20:53 +0000
Umm...why not just look at the wristwatch on your left wrist? It takes less than a second to glance over to it, you can seconds if you think it will take longeer.. It best to have a digital watch but if you are using an analog watch it is good to glance at it just before your final adjustment of the sextant so that you know where to look of the second hand. Look at the second hand first then the minute hand.
say the reading out loud to yourself while you reach for your smart phone than has the voice recorder app running.
Then say, e.g., "time fifty four and sixteen after the hour" repeat twice while looking at the watch to make sure you have read it correctly, didn't make a mistake about the minutes. Then read the sextant out loud twice, making sure that you have the correct degree, I always say, "the minutes increase this way so it is, e.g., 54 decimal 2 minutes and the degrees are fourteen."
Prior to the start of the observations I record that the " time is about sixteen fifty local time on February 13th "so I won't make a mistake about the hour when I listen to the recording and put then numbers down on paper. At the end I take a reading of the index error three times either using the horizon or touching the two edges of the sun. Rather than trying to convert "off the arc" readings in my head I just read out the micrometer reading and say "minus one degree" this makes it easy to do the average.
gl
From: Bill Lionheart <NoReply_Lionheart@fer3.com>
To: garylapook@pacbell.net
Sent: Friday, February 12, 2016 3:08 AM
Subject: [NavList] Re: Best way to record time for solo sights
Thanks Wolfgang. I was thinking of an Arduino route if nothing cheap and commercial was availiable (thanks for the otherinteresting leads too folks).
There are plenty of Arduino watch projects I have seen and ofcourse we just want something very simple.
I wondered if you just got a simple clock module with a 7 segment display if there was a way to just freeeze the display with a minimal change? An Arduino seems way more than we need for a simple clock!
Another thought was I wondered if one was gong to be bothered to make such a clock ifit was worth arranging so it could be seen in the telescope of the sextant as a head up display? Then I thought if you are doing this why dont we have an encoder on the arc to measure the angle and display that. And then I realised this was getting silly as CN is meant to be a back up for when the elctronics go wrong and I went to bed.
I would be quite happy with an economical "stop clock"! Happy to try to help if anyone wants to start a project to make one.
