NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Re: Averaging
From: Fred Hebard
Date: 2004 Oct 7, 23:34 -0400
From: Fred Hebard
Date: 2004 Oct 7, 23:34 -0400
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
