NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
"Differential" Altitude Measurement (?)
From: Greg R_
Date: 2006 May 31, 23:37 -0500
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From: Greg R_
Date: 2006 May 31, 23:37 -0500
Don't know if this is a "legitimate" celestial
technique, but it seems to work...
Venus is really close to the moon tonight
(Wednesday, on the west coast of the US), but I wasn't able to find its
reflection in the artificial horizon (might work better when it's darker, I've
been able to bring down Jupiter that way).
So as a substitute technique, I got a good
altitude on the Moon in the AH, then quickly measured the vertical angle between
it and Saturn (or really guesstimated by eyeball, it's hard to be accurate since
the moon is still a crescent tonight), subtracted that from the first
reading, and used it for Saturn's Hs. Navigator software gives me an
intercept of 1.1 NM on this, therefore I'm guessing that it either works or
all of the errors fell my way for a change... ;-)
The navigation texts talk about using a sextant
to measure horizontal angles to get a fix in the piloting section, so wouldn't
this just be a variation on that technique? If so, does it have a "real" name of
its own?
--
Thanks,
GregR
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