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Dear Peter,

> Agree with this, although remember that when this topic has come up in the
> past others have expressed a preference for big and heavy, arguing that such
> instruments are easier to hold steady. Small and light is certainly
> facilitates stowage in a small boat.

Unfortunately, I have to travel a lot by land and air,
before I reach a boat or even a seashore:-(
And this is a bigger problem than stowage on a small boat.

Speaking of holding a sextant steady (in a strong wind, I suppose)
I never had problems with this with my relatively light
aluminium sextant (SNO-T), though I imagine problems of this
sort with a plastic sextant. On the other hand, with some heavier
brass sextants I tried, and especially with a heavy prismatic
scope, my hand gets tired quickly, so it is hard to make
a series of more than 3-4 observations.

Returning to the topic of the ideal sextant, I strongly
prefer a good inverting scope to a prizmatic scope.
(I am taking about 6x or 8x scopes) because an inverting one
is much lighter, while other characteristics are similar.
I wonder why they don't make inverting scopes anymore.

One possible explanation is that the current sextant manufacturers
prefer to use a ready part from a big binocular manufacturer
instead of making a scope themselves. But on the other hand,
they do make straight Galileo scopes themselves.

Alex.

   

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