NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
From: David Pike
Date: 2025 Sep 29, 15:01 -0700
Frank
Thankyou for your comments. In fact, partly by luck, it turned out to be one of your easier quizzes. What I did was place your first photograph on my left hand 24” monitor and set the values you gave in Solarium Web on my right hand 24” monitor. Fortunately, your first photograph shows a few trees just like Solarium, so it was easy to see where the horizon was in both Solarium and your first photograph. Then I spun the Solarium view through 360 degrees looking for a shape just above the horizon that matched the shapes in the photograph. These I checked later turned out to be Hercules Nu, Xi, Mu, and Omni. The first possibility I found looked close enough to look for more distant matches. The parallelogram, which I’d never noticed before (my vision these days is limited to Vega plus a few other bright stars), also fitted in. Checks on the remaining stars fitted in sufficiently well to make the call. It was just like ‘reading from map to ground technique from a light aircraft’. The only problem was “Where was Vega?”. Then it dawned on me; Vega had to be behind the window frame. Why else would you ask for the Alt and Az of the centre of the frame? Returning to Solarium, they give you the Az and Alt of the selected body in the top lefthand corner of the screen.
The ‘hot dog stand’ on the rim of the volcano looks like it's going to be a much tougher problem. DaveP






