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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@fer3.com> 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

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