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A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Re: Revisiting automatic sextants
From: Paul Dolkas
Date: 2023 Nov 29, 15:59 -0800
From: Paul Dolkas
Date: 2023 Nov 29, 15:59 -0800
Note from FER: This message was sent a month ago and arbitrarily stopped by a spam filter. I discovered it just a few hours ago.
I was looking into digital sextants a number of years ago while working on my Master’s degree in optics. One thing that became apparent was that for stationary (or nearly so) observers, a digital inclinometer was a much better approach to determining vertical than shooting the horizon. Especially if one is on land. These things were pretty cheap and accurate 15 years ago; I expect them to be more so today. Shooting the horizon seems to be an error-prone approach for all sorts of reasons – it’s out of the question on land, and it’s frequently so when in the air due to clouds.
