NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
From: Roger Puttman
Date: 2024 Jan 19, 01:23 -0800
Hi Murray,
yes the sights were taken from the back veranda with a sea horizon with about 100 deg of azimuth so I could only work wth that. Mostly sun sights as it was hard to get stars to cooperate.
I took lots of sights and then used a range of heights of eye to see what would happen. Once I got to 49' it all seemed to stabilise. Yes I knew my exact position from chart and GPS. So yes a reverse engineering.
The easiest thing would have been to do a vertical sextant angle from the beach but there were houses in the way and I couldn't actually see the beach or the house. Hence the more laborious method. Actually it forced an interesting exercise.
All of this is past tense. Progress dictated more and bigger houses and the skyline has gone. I have also moved house and no horizon there.
I too have a collection of navigation books, up to 200 years old, along with old seamanship manuals too.
