NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Re: Star to Star Distances taken on a Second Hand Sextant
From: David Pike
Date: 2019 Dec 7, 13:32 -0800
From: David Pike
Date: 2019 Dec 7, 13:32 -0800
Why bother to wear a hair shirt when you can do spherical trig instead? I thought I ought to check that the inter star angles quoted in Bauer’s book hadn’t changed significantly since the second edition was printed. They’ve changed very little; 0.1 minutes in the case of Deneb-Vega, and 0.2 minutes in the case of Betelgeuse-Pollux. Therefore, for a very rough check, you can still use the values in the second edition of Bauer’s book, not forgetting of course what’s already been said about refraction. Upon checking our notebook, I see we did in fact record the times we took readings on each pair as 19.44 and 20.18. DaveP
File:
