NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Re: Using star-star distances
From: Frank Reed
Date: 2008 Sep 23, 23:42 -0400
From: Frank Reed
Date: 2008 Sep 23, 23:42 -0400
Hewitt S., you wrote: "I'm trying to restore an Ebbco sextant. What I need is a set of shades and the spring retainer for the horizon mirror or an entire horizon mirror assembly. The model I have is the later one with the larger mirrors and three index-mirror shades." If you don't get any hits on this after a week, let me know. There are several at Mystic Seaport (for classroom use, not in the collections) that are in various states of repair, and it may be possible to cannibalize the parts you need. And you wrote: "FWIW : I used an Ebbco for years and it always stayed true to the DR and always got me there." True to the DR meaning...? As long as the fix and the DR were not more than perhaps five miles apart, you would have considered that acceptable, right? So random errors even as large as +/-2 minutes (on top of inescapable observation errors) would have been hard to detect in the pre-GPS era. Just so there's no misunderstanding, I always recommend plastic sextants to people who want to do standard, basic LOP celestial navigation. But I would note that I frequently find that the sorts of people who are interested in celestial today are also interested in owning an instrument that they can be proud of, and for reasons which are only partly rational, plastic sextants don't make the cut. -FER --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ Navigation List archive: www.fer3.com/arc To post, email NavList@fer3.com To , email NavList-@fer3.com -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---