NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Key West near-LAN sights
From: Peter Hakel
Date: 2013 May 17, 17:13 -0700
From: Peter Hakel
Date: 2013 May 17, 17:13 -0700
Today (May 17, 2013) I took six Sun LL observations from a beach on the south shore of Key West, Florida. It looks like I just missed the LAN, so the resulting noon curve extrapolates a little, which is always a concern. The index error on my Davis Mark 15 was initially 5' off the arc; I remeasured it after sights #3 and #5, when it came up 3' off the arc.
Conditions: partly cloudy, nice horizon.
T = 26 C
HE = 7 ft
P = 1016 mb
Considering all this, I'd say the results are not too bad:
Lat: N 24° 38' ("exact" Lat: N 24° 33')
Lon: W 83° 16' ("exact" Lon: W 81° 46')
For additional details, see attachments. I never read such high altitudes (over 84 degrees) but it did not seem to be difficult. The instability of the index error was kind of expected based on what I have seen before with my sextant. I suspect missing the moment of LAN is the main source of error here, since I didn't get a nice "symmetric" data set around LAN this time.
It got cloudy in the afternoon and evening; so I had to abandon my plans for a Sun-Moon fix, Sun lunar, and a LAM (Moon transit, a.k.a. "local apparent Moon" using this list's lingo :-) ).
Peter Hakel
Conditions: partly cloudy, nice horizon.
T = 26 C
HE = 7 ft
P = 1016 mb
Considering all this, I'd say the results are not too bad:
Lat: N 24° 38' ("exact" Lat: N 24° 33')
Lon: W 83° 16' ("exact" Lon: W 81° 46')
For additional details, see attachments. I never read such high altitudes (over 84 degrees) but it did not seem to be difficult. The instability of the index error was kind of expected based on what I have seen before with my sextant. I suspect missing the moment of LAN is the main source of error here, since I didn't get a nice "symmetric" data set around LAN this time.
It got cloudy in the afternoon and evening; so I had to abandon my plans for a Sun-Moon fix, Sun lunar, and a LAM (Moon transit, a.k.a. "local apparent Moon" using this list's lingo :-) ).
Peter Hakel
File:
File:
File: 124081.noon_motion.xls
File: 124081.sun.xls
