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A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Re: Lunar contrast
From: Geoffrey Kolbe
Date: 2016 Sep 12, 06:57 +0100
From: Geoffrey Kolbe
Date: 2016 Sep 12, 06:57 +0100
On 11 September 2016 at 20:18, Hewitt Schlereth <NoReply_Schlereth@fer3.com> wrote:
Would polarized sunglasses work?Hewitt
You can certainly see the effect using polarized sunglasses. But you need to rotate the sunglasses (or your head) as you look up to the sky to align the polarization axis of your glasses correctly. If aligned correctly, you will see a dark band in the sky from horizon to horizon through an arc at 90 degrees to the sun. I suspect it will be inconvenient to align you glasses and your sextant at the same time to take a lunar. Best to have a polarizing element on the sextant itself. A polarizer on the sextant only needs to be aligned once. Thereafter, it will be correctly aligned for all lunars.
Geoffrey
