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From: David Weilacher (no email)
Date: Wed Aug 11 2004 - 15:36:38 EDT
Hi George;
I picture it this way.
Instead of an octant, or a sextant, I'm out there with a halftent (I'm pretty sure this would be called a puptent).
Sun comes up in east I have east horizon. Every hour I take a lower limb sight using the east horizon only.
LAN comes and goes.
I am still bringing the same limb of the sun down to the same horizon even in the afternoon. With my puptent, I can do this all the way to sundown.
Problem is that in the afternoon, the limb that I am bring down is the upper limb, refraction wise, but appears as lower limb against east horizon through the eyepiece of my puptent.
Our marine almanac combines semidiameter and refraction together as one figure. Thats what makes our lower and upper limb corrections different.
Do I have this pictured to your satisfaction?
Dave W
-----Original Message-----
From: George Huxtable <>
Sent: Aug 11, 2004 12:17 PM
To:
Subject: Re: Reducing back sights
Bill Noyce wrote-
>George Huxtable asks:
>
>> A further question now arises: what does Jim Thompson
>> wish to use an octant backsight FOR?
>
>I had a different reading of the question. I assumed Jim was
>using a sextant to measure the altitude of a body high in the
>sky, but without a suitable horizon under it. He's measuring
>the altitude from the opposite horizon instead. In that case
>he has the procedure exactly correct.
>
>David Weilacher raises a concern about differing refraction
>between UL and LL corrections. I think Jim's procedure works
>correctly, as long as he remembers that what looks like a LL
>measurement in the backsight is really measuring the (supplement
>of the) altitude of the body's LL, and vice versa. The key is
>to perform all the corrections for the body itself *after*
>subtracting the reading from 180. Jim is correct that index
>error and dip corrections should be applied *before* subtracting
>from 180. After correcting for dip and index error, and
>subtracting the result from 180, the result is just what you
>would have gotten from a normal forward sight after the same
>corrections.
>
===============
Response from George:
Thanks, Bill, for putting me right. Clearly, I've been too involved in the
historical stuff recently! When the expression "back sight" came up, I
immediately thought of octants and their modifications. But it seems that
Jim is preparing to indulge, with a sextant, in what I described as option
4-. "At sea, he wishes to measure the altitude of a body above a horizon
which is obscured by nearby land or by mist, though the horizon in the
opposite direction is clear."
This works with a sextant, as long as the altitude of the body is greater
that 60deg or so. And indeed, there's no problem with a sextant in checking
index error, as there would be with an octant in back-observation mode, so
my comments about index error were irrelevant.
So I concur with Jim, and with Bill. Correct for index error and dip in the
normal way, then subtract from 180. This will give the elevation of the
apparent limb above the true (but invisible) horizon beneath it, in the
range 0 to 90 degrees. From now on, everything else is as normal. Allow for
refraction in the normal way, by subtracting an amount corresponding with
the measured altitude. Add parallax in the normal way, by adding it. Allow
for semidiameter in the normal way, by adding (for lower limb) or
subtracting (if upper). What you need to be VERY careful to note is
whether, in the view in the sextant with the body behind your head, you
measured the upper-limb or the lower-limb touching the horizon, because in
that view, for back observations, the lower-limb will appear above the
upper-limb! (I THINK that last sentence is correct, but somebody please
confirm or deny it, because I haven't altogether convinced myself...)
George.
================================================================
contact George Huxtable by email at , by phone at
01865 820222 (from outside UK, +44 1865 820222), or by mail at 1 Sandy
Lane, Southmoor, Abingdon, Oxon OX13 5HX, UK.
================================================================
Dave Weilacher
.US Coast Guard licensed captain
. #889968
.ASA instructor evaluator and celestial
. navigation instructor #990800
.IBM AS400 RPG contract programmer
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