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Robin,

The star field background method might work here. I'll let Frank tackle that.

Your image of Fomalhaut to a short horizon could give a reasonable LOP provided that your lens is calibrated through the visible field. Calibration is best done using a filtered setting Sun from a known location and height of eye. The focus needs to be at infinite and the focal length needs to be fixed. A fixed prime lens on a digital single lens reflex camera body works best. Zoom lenses aren't recommended.

My guess was based on coastline intersection of a Fomalhaut azimuth bearing as it passes through the probe's third stage cut off GP point. Not very precise. Hopefully I got the right state ;-)

Greg Rudzinski

Re: LADEE Moon Probe Puzzle
From: Robin Stuart
Date: 2013 Sep 13, 15:27 -0700
Greg,
Unfortunately the moorings are a bit of a red herring here and this is actually an inland location. There is enough information provided to get a reasonable fix and narrow things down considerably.
At the risk of pinning down the size of the body of water and giving the show away, I estimate that the height of the camera was 5 feet and have measured the distance to the shoreline below Fomalhaut as 0.9nm. I haven't tried this myself yet and don't know how well it will work. This is a fairly wide angle view and there might be significant variation in angular scale across the image but as leading advocate for the use of the digital camera as sextant you would know better than I whether this presents a problem,

Regards,
Robin Stuart

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