Next message: Ken Gebhart: "Re: averaging devices on sextants"
On Oct 7, 2004, at 12:45 AM, Alexandre Eremenko wrote:
> Many manuals advise to take several sights
> in short sequence and then to average the result.
> and to reduce the average as one sight.
> (Chauvenet recommends at most 6, Russian manuals 3-5).
> The purpose is to increase accuracy,
> and, probably more importantly, to reject the sights
> with an evident "human error".
>
> Alex.
Alex,
Your post certainly generated a great thread.
With 5 or 6 reps, one _slightly_ bad sight wouldn't throw off the
average very much, so I'm not sure that rejection is necessary. An
_extremely_ bad sight would throw off the average; it probably also
would be obvious on inspection of the raw data, so that graphing might
not be needed to detect it.
Fred
