NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
From: Frank Reed
Date: 2025 Jun 18, 12:29 -0700
Hello, Bob J. Welcome aboard!
You asked:
"Having taken a series of readings (sun and moon distances) I have been averaging what I consider good ones to get a time and Ds. I assume I can use the fit to slope method instead as per altitude measurement. Any problems with this? "
Yes. You can, so long as the interval from start to end isn't more than the "linear" time for the lunars (which is variable depending on the geometry but safely 15 minutes). But you probably don't need to do that. Could you give an example of a series of lunar sights you've taken? Rather than selecting "good ones" or trying to fit the sights to a slope, you could just clear them all. If you haven't tried it yet, you can do this very easily using my Lunars Analysis web app.
Care to tell us more about your Lunars experiments? What sort of sextant are you using? Are you doing Sun-Moon lunars or using stars and planets? Any other variety to the game? :)
Frank Reed
PS: Lunars workshop online, first week of August "Pacific" schedule: details.
