NavList:

"Out of 9 sights the largest error I had (using  Frank's online utility) was
0.3'. I had 3 sights that reduced and showed 0'  error (honest!)."

Sounds good to me. I find that I can get distances with  a standard deviation
of about 0.25' of arc repeatably as long as I'm using a  good, well-adjusted
sextant. However, there is real variability even among  expensive metal
sextants, and it's not at all unusual to see considerably larger  errors.

I shot a bunch of lunars myself this week and discovered once  again an
interesting problem for me personally --I'm terrible at lunars with  stars! I get
good results (within the error limits I stated above) when I use  the Sun,
Jupiter, Saturn, and Mars when it's close. But my lunars with stars are 
consistently worse. This week I noticed that my near limb lunars were all short  by
about 0.8 minutes of arc while my far limb lunars were all long by about the 
same amount. So apparently, when I shoot lunars with stars, I have a tendency to 
see contact when the star is actually some distance away from the limb. It
will  be interesting to see if I can "un-learn" this...

-FER
42.0N 87.7W, or  41.4N 72.1W.
www.HistoricalAtlas.com/lunars 


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