NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
From: Marty Lyons
Date: 2014 Oct 1, 19:16 -0700
I have been practicing sun sights with an artificial horizon (plate of oil) and seem to have all my fixes wind up about 1-3 miles south and slightly west of my position. I am at N40 22, W74 40. I wonder what is causing this consistent error? Granted sighting on a quivering body of oil is not the best, but it's all I have. I wonder if it's a timing issue. I use a digital clock, set to GMT, corrected for error at each use. I also use a mechanical stopwatch. When I get the tangency, I grab the stopwatch,and start it. I stop the stopwatch when the GMT clock reaches the next whole minute, then I subtract the stopwatch reading from the GMT time to get my sight time. I account for a two second loss in grabbing the stopwatch. Any ideas why my fixes are always south?
