NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Re: Time recording,Russian manuals, etc.
From: Jan Kalivoda
Date: 2004 Oct 1, 10:11 +0200
From: Jan Kalivoda
Date: 2004 Oct 1, 10:11 +0200
Allow me three comments, please: As for marking the time of observation in our days - for the lonely navigator without the crew, it should be difficullt to mark twilight observations of several stars on deck even with modern stopwatches you have mentioned - either he has to write notes in the flying spray or to go under deck to make them. Both is cumbersome. Is it not possible to use some sprayproof sound recorder (a digital one today, not mechanical)? And I saw some "chronographs" with the lap function that can be fitted to the sextant, e.g. "Datascope" by Celestair, but other cheaper solutions in catalogues of sextant makers, too. The combination of those two gadgets seems an ideal set for a today's lonely celestial navigator (or for a holiday navigator whose family isn't interested in CelNav :) to me. According to the standard Russian work on the nautical astronomy from the fifties and sixties (Matusevich, "Fundamentals of the Nautical Astronomy"), in no way was permitted to take the chronometer to the deck. For marking observation times, the observation clock was used, jumping in half seconds (or in 0.4 seconds, so as to make very accurate comparisons of chronometers possible - by sound coincidences). This aggrees to Alexandre's quotation by memory. I cannot understand, why the observing mate would have said "yest = yes sir" to the petty officer marking the time of observation. This "yest" means "There IS the contact now" probably, isn' it? Of course, I am not a Russian native speaker. Jan Kalivoda