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A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Re: Kollsman periscopic sextant mount
From: Gary LaPook
Date: 2011 May 24, 00:47 -0700
From: Gary LaPook
Date: 2011 May 24, 00:47 -0700
| All of my in flight shots have been taken with various hand held sextants, A-7, MA-1, MA-2 and mostly with an A-10A. It is useful to be able to see the pattern of the stars which I could do when using the hand held sextants. After reading 'Flying in the Black Hole" I decided to set up my periscopic sextant mount to get some feeling for the difficulties faced by B-52 navigators without a window with which to see the constellations. So I do the precomps with H.O. 249 vol. 1 and the SAC form,( I got the precomp time down to ten minutes for three stars) and go out and shoot three star fixes. You learn real quickly that without the precomp you could never find the right star in the sextant. You also find out that the two minutes between shots is very busy. I tried the true bearing method first but found that it takes a lot of that two minute period to
crank the bearing counter. I found it much easier to compute the inverse relative bearing as part of the precomp and then set the bearing counter on the heading so I could then locate the stars simply by looking for their IRBs in the sextant field of view. How did you guys do this? gl --- On Mon, 5/23/11, Larry Smith <larryiah@yahoo.com> wrote:
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