NavList:

Hi David,

I've been doing lunars for about 15 years and still consider myself a very junior apprentice.

Your first try posed a few unknown firsts for me.

I've never used Venus for lunars before (small extra altitude  corrections for paralax and refraction ) and no SD.

I've never used artifical horizons either (ignore dip correction) 

so assuming I got those bits correct, I tried your sight 1 via the cosine formula in John Karl book page 92. (which I have loaded on a Casio fx-3650P programable calculator)

Unforunately , I think I must have made a mistake somewhere and got a GMT of the sight 08.2.30, which seems way out from  the approx 8.23.you mention.

Could you provide your DR lat and long so that I could check against Frank's online site? Also the actual GMT of the sight?

I may have got some of the assumptions wrong.

Normally , with 3 separate readings, I would graph them out, use best fit curve (or hopefully, if all taken within about 5 minutes, a straight line) and choose 3 readings at a single time point. In your case, it looks as if sight 2 may be an outlier which could be excluded?

Anyways, let me know what the correct answer should be and I'll try to figure out where I went wrong and then describe the method in detail for you.

Best wishes and welcome to the lunatic fringe!

Francis