NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
From: David C
Date: 2017 Jan 6, 01:26 -0800
I went outside at about 2030 local time. The sun was very low. Looking around I saw the moon between some clouds. I rushed inside to get my sextant. It took me a while to work out how to align the bright sun with the relatively dim moon without accidentally ruining my eyes. At one stage I would have had to stand on my head to operate the sextant. Eventually I got the moon and sun images together and took a sight. Then I could not find my pen and in my haste forgot to write down the minutes (time).
By now the sun was behind the roof line of the garage so I stood on the picnic table and managed to get another sight as the sun slowly disappeared behind some trees as in a Hollywood movie. I entered the numbers into the calculator and decided to write the sight off to experience. Next time I will know what to expect and will be better organised. For example I will select filters so that the sun isn't too much brighter than the moon.
By now Venus was bright so I made six Moon - Venus observations. For four of the sights I used the binoculars (as a monocular) and the larger images did make the observations easier. Here are the results from the calculator:
Error in Lunar
-9.3' no binocular
-0.3' no binocular
0'
-0.4'
0.5'
0.7'
A star (Sirius?) appeared and I made a brief attempt to use it for a lunar. I decided that I would have to wait until it got darker and not wanting to do that ended my sight taking for the night.
Frank I found your lunar calculator very quick and easy to use. It is very useful tool when practicing measuring lunar distances. I particularly like the fact that I can use it on my PC with a mouse and a proper keyboard. I find touch screen apps that require user input frustrating. I seem to make lots of mistakes with a touch screen.
I can probably move on to the theory of clearing the lunar distance soon (-;