NavList:

Frank - thank you for the words of encouragement.  I was trying to minimize my work and picked Regulus since it was close, which I figured would make finding the star easier - I will now start looking for things further away (Lesson 3!).

I had thought about using Mars since it is nice and bright and on the ecliptic.  I should have changed targets after struggling with Regulus for a bit.  Lesson 4 is being a bit more flexible.  I will take your suggestion to shoot at twilight, as well.

I will start looking at Thompson's Tables. Thank you for the historical reference.

The details on my sight series:

UT Date: 4/3/23

Actual Position: 35° 46.9'N  79° 3.4'W

Regulus to Moon (near limb).  As I do not have a horizon to work with (and I didn't want to drag the Kollsman out with me), the altitudes are taken from phone app (Star Chart) at the selected time from the graph.  Stark provides WW (wrong way) tables for those using actual (not sextant) altitudes and I used these to come up with Regulus altitude of 53° 17.2' and Moon altitude of 46° 26.8'.

Measured IC 2.0' on the scale

UT time (hack taken 10 minutes prior on a stable watch) and measured (guessed?) distances

00:25:30  7° 48.1'

00:27:08  7° 49.1'

00:29:21  7° 46.8'

00:31:21  7° 48.3'

00:32:49  7° 50.6'

00:34:05  7° 51.3'

00:36:15  7° 51.3'  (This one was on one of the mean curves so I used this directly)

00:37:29  7° 52.1'

00:39:04  7° 55.8'

00:43:22  7° 53.7

Let me know where I went astray!  :-)