NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
From: Peter Hakel
Date: 2019 May 26, 09:30 -0700
About an hour ago I conducted a quick exercise presetting a sextant to the Sun-Moon near-limb distance (no refraction corrections).
Sextant: Astra III Professional with the 7x35 Celestaire telescope
Calculations with Navigation Spreadsheets (screenshots attached)
Date: May 26, 2019
Local time: 9:25 am, U.S. Mountain Daylight Time
Universal Time: 15:25
Location: 35° 53’ N, 106° 19’ W
Sun:
GHA: 51° 59.4’
Dec: N 21° 08.8’
SD: 15.8’
Moon:
GHA: 137° 19.1’
Dec: S 13° 17.7’
SD: 14.8’
HP: 54.3’
Topocentric lunar distance: 91° 07.0’
Subtracting the sum of the two semidiameters: 30.6’
Presetting the sextant to: 90° 36.4’
Then, I pointed the sextant at the Moon and soon the Sun appeared right on top of Moon’s limb, as expected. I did not even check the index error beforehand (the sextant has been sitting in its box for months). The whole procedure lasted less than 15 minutes; doing this write-up took somewhat longer than that. :-) A good result overall.
Peter Hakel
https://www.navigation-spreadsheets.com
