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A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
From: Joe Wong
Date: 2022 Aug 17, 08:15 -0700
I was wondering if anyone here like the idea of using a stopwatch to register time of sights,instead of casting a quick glance at his wristwatch after achieving tangency.
It appears to me that the use of stopwatches,if carried out carefully, can produce lesser or even none delays when compared with "a quick glance at your wristwatch". I've looked up the matter in the Bowditch and strangely found no reference to such stopwatch methods whatsoever.
I initially used a digital wristwatch to do my shots and always add one second to my noted time to compensate for that delay caused by me shifting my eyesight from the telescope to the wristwatch. Gradually,I came up with such an idea of using mechanical stopwatches since I myself own quite a few(I indulged in amateur horology some years ago and have collected several pocket watches and similar timepieces)
( I assume that someone would suggest me about a method of keep both of my eyes open while taking a shot,the right eye to engage in getting tangency sights and the left eye to continuously focus on the timepiece. Sadly I cannot do so since I am a "land navigator" and have to constantly shut my left eye to prevent contacting with reflected sun rays while shooting through the artificial horizon. )
Pic shows two of my favourite stopwatches now primarily engaged in sight taking. Left one is a Heuer with a split-second function,which I found out to be extremely handy when taking multiple successive sights. Right one is a WWII era Elgin 10-second fast-beater( hand cycles around the dial in only ten seconds!) This one does not have the split-second function but it's much easy to read, and the rather large angular graduation gap between neibouring seconds allow me to quickly tell where the hand rests therefore rounding the seconds much quicker.