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Don't know if this is a "legitimate" celestial technique, but it seems to work...
Venus is really close to the moon tonight (Wednesday, on the west coast of the US), but I wasn't able to find its reflection in the artificial horizon (might work better when it's darker, I've been able to bring down Jupiter that way).
So as a substitute technique, I got a good altitude on the Moon in the AH, then quickly measured the vertical angle between it and Saturn (or really guesstimated by eyeball, it's hard to be accurate since the moon is still a crescent tonight), subtracted that from the first reading, and used it for Saturn's Hs. Navigator software gives me an intercept of 1.1 NM on this, therefore I'm guessing that it either works or all of the errors fell my way for a change... ;-)
The navigation texts talk about using a sextant to measure horizontal angles to get a fix in the piloting section, so wouldn't this just be a variation on that technique? If so, does it have a "real" name of its own?
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Thanks,
GregR
