NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
From: Peter Hakel
Date: 2016 Dec 12, 15:51 -0800
A week ago I had an all too rare opportunity to use my Davis Mark 15 sextant with a real sea horizon during a visit to Santa Barbara, California. I report 4 observations spread over two days (Monday and Tuesday) made from the same location on the beach. Given the usual vagaries of getting at the index correction on a plastic sextant, I think that obtaining a computed fix at 4 nautical miles from the GPS position given by my phone is a decent result.
On one of the Sun shots (the “morning one”) I also eyeballed the azimuth as 155 using my phone’s electronic compass; the computed result from intercept.xls was 157.
The calculations were all done with Navigation Spreadsheets; I only attach screenshots of the last two used in this exercise.
GPS position:
Latitude: N 34° 25’ 7”
Longitude: W 119° 40’ 24”
many_body_fix.xls:
Latitude: N 34° 22’
Longitude: W 119° 37’
Error: 4 nm
Peter Hakel
