NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
From: Mark Coady
Date: 2015 Sep 8, 17:20 -0700
Did a bunch of sights this weekend. Was very pleased as 6 came out under one minute of angle (.7, .8. etc...and one within .2 (pure chance as it exceeds theroetical accuracy).
I just added a 7x scope to my astra 3B, which sure seems to help.
I found several things after errors up to 2' on my first few sights. One its awkward to hold the sextant (especially after a very long swim) so i tended to rest the rubber eyecup on my eye or sextant parts onto my hand. My perception was this produced very minor deflection and some loss of accuracy. It was also hard to really keep the sextant scope centered on my eye because of the awkward hold.
I was using the moon as the viewed, sun as reflected body. This meant the sextand handle is on top. and the sextant hanging under the hand.
New to the prism scope I flipped it 180 with appropriate filter swaps,e.g. handle on bottom so easy to cradle, but could not aquire the moon as the reflected body, even though I was looking at it easily flipped 180.
Is this because 1. I am a klutz and missed something obvious?, or 2. the full field of view created by the prism scope makes the much dimmer moon hard to aquire in this circumstance?
I recall using a sight tube with no mag with no problem both ways to get my rough settings, before attaching my scope. Likewise the galilao scope was ok with its split image.