NavList:

A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding

HOME

Re: Revisiting automatic sextants
From: Bill Lionheart
Date: 2023 Nov 6, 03:46 +0000

Frank, I like the randomization, its a good way to increase the resolution.

There is a kind of electron microscope tomography of identical virus particles. Usually in tomography one carefully rotates the object taking projections. But in this case one has alot of randomly ordered particles, assumed to be the same. This is how they get nice 3D pictures of somd viruses (not SARS cov2 as they are squishy and not all the same!)

So for your idea the analagous thing is we have lots of random views of the same sky-ground spherical scene and we combine them to get better-than-pixel resolution. With the horizon visible we have a fix. A super--fix as every identical astronomical body gives a LoP (although that might not be the best way to actually do it, more like a 2 parameter fit to your sky model). If you can see the moon it may not even need a clock... it effectively averages all lunars.

Does'nt need to be a cube, or even platonic solid. A ball covered in randomly distributed cameras would do.

Bill Lionheart

On Mon, 6 Nov 2023, 03:22 NavList Community, <NavList@navlist.net> wrote:

Bill Lionheart, you wrote:
"My thought is that digital image stabilization has improved on cameras (perhaps thanks to smart phones), and stabilized platforms for video cameras are also available at a consumer level now (for accounting for larger motions where the object of interest would go out of view)."
Interesting idea! And there's a good chance that this exists in some cheap package (ready to be built into the next smartphone on the market). Does anyone have any experience with image stablization?
Meanwhile, I just had a related thought. Suppose I stick six cameras on the faces of a little cube (I'm thinking 10cm on a side). I toss it up in the air. It spins and rolls rather randomly and captures continuous imagery, simultaneous imagery from each of its cameras but with no other hardware, e.g. inertial system, for determining a local vertical. It drops back into my hand (it's on the end of a rubber band, or maybe it's a drone, too, and it flies back to my hand!). It does a little image processing and some onboard celestial calculations, and then it displays the latitude and longitude. Like magic. Ta-daaa. That's either feasible today or within a very short period of time.
Frank Reed

What is NavList?

NavList is a community devoted to the preservation and practice of celestial navigation and other methods of traditional position-finding. We're a group of navigators, navigation enthusiasts and hobbyists, mathematicians and physicists, and historians interested in all aspects of navigation but primarily those techniques which are non-electronic.

To post a message, if you are already signed up as a NavList member, start a new discussion or reply to any posted message and use your posting code (this is a simple low-security password assigned when you join). You may also join by posting. Your first on-topic messsage automatically makes you a member, and a posting code will be assigned and emailed to you for future posts.

Uniquely, the NavList message boards also permit full interaction entirely by email. You can optionally receive individual posts or daily digests by email, and any member can post messages by email (bypassing the web site) by sending to our posting address which is "NavList@NavList.net". This functionality is similar to a traditional Internet mailing list: post by email, read by email, reply by email. Most members will prefer the web interface here for posting and replying to messages.

NavList is more than an online community... more about that another day.

© Copyright notice: please note that the rights to all messages and posts in this discussion group are held by their respective authors. No messages or text or images extracted from messages may be reproduced without the explicit consent of the message author. Email me, Frank Reed, if you have any questions.

Subject:
Author:
Start date:	(yyyymm dd)
End date:	(yyyymm dd)

NavList:

A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding

Compose Your Message

NavList

What is NavList?

Join / Get NavList ID Code

Retrieve a NavList ID Code

Email Settings

Custom Index

Add Images & Files
Name or NavList Code:	Email:

Name:
	(please, no nicknames or handles)
Email:

NavList ID Code: