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A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
From: Frank Reed
Date: 2023 Oct 10, 12:14 -0700
I'm impresssed you tried shooting Eltanin! It must have been quite close to your zenith at that time. Eltanin is one of those few among the "Official 57" that I count as "fillers" (given the font and the assigned space on the page back in 1958 when the new Nautical Almanac design was finalized, they had room for 57). Another example would be Zubenelgenubi which we have discussed before. These are both relatively faint stars, difficult for sextant sights. That doesn't stop me from teaching Zubenelgenubi in some of my classes or talking about it on my stargazing cruises in the early summer. It's too much fun to say aloud, and it's nearly literal Arabic, and it's the very first navigation star name that I learned back when I was six or seven years old.
Frank Reed
