Living on the West coast, I get to see a good deal of cloud cover and run out when the sky clears to take a few shots. One year we had no visible sky for 28 days in a row.
Cloud cover has always been the weak spot in celestial navigation, and I can remember talking to the first mate on a big French bulk carrier we were loading coal into, and he said his last
trip from Europe to Japan, they only got two or three celestial fixes. Fortunately his ship had one of the early GPS units, and he was thankful for it. It was the size of a kitchen stove in 1982.
Anyway, I was wondering if a camera that was more sensitive to more of the spectrum was fixed to a sextant could it get enough detail to make a shot on a cloudy day, or perhaps even see the stars during the day? I suppose there would be diffraction issues as I know when I am shooting stars through high, thin cloud, my results get more random. I think surveyors used to shoot Polaris during the day.
I always like to think of how much the sextant could advance as a navigation tool if coupled with more modern technology.. I have seen pictures of sextants that record the time of the shot, and that alone is a big plus. I know from time to time the list members come up with ideas on sextant improvements, and I was wondering if it would be possible to make the cloud cover a non-issue.
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