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NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
From: David Pike
Date: 2020 Nov 17, 01:47 -0800
Ed Popko you wrote: Does anyone recognize these cards? There are 7 in the set, printed both sides
Well it’s no good googling ‘star strips’. That will only get you into trouble. Googling ‘star constellation identification strips’ gets you to the right type of stars but is not much help after that.
An avenue to follow might be materials and manufacture. The inner film appears to be poorly copied by modern standards laminated between a type of plastic which darkenss slightly with age, possibly celluloid ish. How does it smell/singe. It looks like the sort of material my 30/60 and 45 degree set squares at college were made from. This plus the 57 named stars hints at the late 50s early 60s at a time before digital photography. This might mean that an item produced on a small scale was never properly photographed or archived. Hence no appearance in Google Images.
The stars appear to move down across the centre line. Has anyone checked if the centre lines are parallel to the celestial equator and what the move down interval is? The hour angle??? calibration appears to have no obvious units. Does anyone recognise them?
I’m wondering if these might be part of a control system for a basic ‘nav school’ planetarium or similar. Put the strip in for the closest latitude; move the levers to the correct position; the gears go round; and the bit of sky you want is projected onto the wall or ceiling. Or maybe I’m having a nightmare. DaveP