NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
From: David Pike
Date: 2024 Nov 22, 13:37 -0800
Well, after three days of opening the bedroom curtains to wonderful winter sunshine after about three weeks of low cloud and finding the Moon right in front of me, I thought this must be the ideal opportunity to see if I could still remember how to complete a Sun Moon Fix. Last week I’d finally got round to clearing the rubbish out of the ‘Astrovan’ to make room in anticipation, so I’d no excuse. I chose a Smiths Mk2C pendulous reference peri-sextant which was returned to stores from RAF Lyneham in 1998 marked serviceable, so it must have been used by the RAF Hercules Fleet until they stopped using sextants and concentrated on using GPS plus whatever other aids they had. I believe the RAF Hercs have all gone now. Anyway, I’d not used this sextant before being married to my Vulcan selection, but it’s a nice sextant with a swivel eyepiece, which is useful for getting myself around all the jutty-out bits in the Astrovan. It turned out to be considerably more accurate than I’d expected after 26 years. Results below: DaveP
