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A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Re: Sextant accuracy (was : Plumb-line horizon vs. geocentric horizon)
From: Bill B
Date: 2005 Feb 13, 21:48 -0500
From: Bill B
Date: 2005 Feb 13, 21:48 -0500
> Of course my optics laboratory is close at hand (my optics lab is my > kitchen...), so I decided to do some simple testing with my own pair of > detector arrays. I drew various shapes on an index card taped on a wall: pairs > of dots, pairs of thick black lines, pairs of thin red lines, pairs of blue > dots, etc. Then I moved away from the card until I couldn't see the difference > between the pairs anymore. The specific geometry and colors made some > difference (lines are easier to split than dots) but in every case I got a > resolution of 1.2 to 1.7 minutes of arc. Next I did similar patterns cut into > a piece of aluminum foil taped over a flashlight and turned out all the > lights. The results were in the same range. Was the range similar before or after corrections for irradiation?Bill
