NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
From: David Pike
Date: 2022 Sep 11, 01:19 -0700
Frank Reed re: Further advice from you. Thanks. Silly me, I hadn’t realised you had to ask for planets to be included in the box at top left.
I’d intended to go to bed early last night and forget lunars for a week, but it was so clear outside that the Moon won. I got four observations to the side of the Moon facing Jupiter and three to the side furthest away. It turns out that my final observation was at Sep10th 21.51 UTC only 12 hours after the full Moon, so which side probably won’t make much difference for my level of observing. Observing from inland without an artificial horizon handy, my heights will have to be calculated rather than observed. For me, Jupiter looks a bit like a Christmas card star observed through my 2.5x scope. I didn’t dare try with the 5x inverting scope. That’s confusing enough to aim with at the best of times. I took my specs off in the end. They just got in the way. Now I’ve got to get on with the clearing.
Question: When a person says I took the average of three observations, do they mean they got three chronometer errors and averaged those, or do they averaged the times of the observations and the distances measured? I’m not sure the latter case would work. DaveP