NavList:

Alan, I'm confident that others will chime in with averaging suggestions, but as an alternative why don't you try graphing those sights and comparing them with the slope of that body's apparent rise or fall over the time of your sextant shots.  You will end up with a picture of your sights, which could offer you with much potentially useful information to use in analysing those sights assisted by some insight the picture will provide as to how consistent, or not, they were.  All you need is some graph paper and the formula for deriving that slope (discussed here quite recently).

On Mon, Dec 6, 2010 at 10:22 AM, Alan <alan202@verizon.net> wrote:

Some here have suggested averaging the times and Hs of a series of sextant shots, as a way of improving accuracy of results. Sounds reasonable, though this opinion seems less than universally shared, so I tried, as follows.

Re the times, I separated hours, minutes and seconds, a series of 5 shots was available, adding the seconds, and dividing by 5. Next, adding the minutes, again dividing by 5. Next adding the hours, dividing by 5. Minutes and hours were adjusted as required.

Respecting Hs, expressed in Degrees, Minutes and tenths, I added the minutes and tenths, and divided by 5. Next I added the degrees, and divided by 5.

Having obtained averages for both time and Hs, these numbers were used to reduce the sights. Turns out that the intercept, difference between Hc and Ho were quite large, much larger than when individual shots were reduced.

Assuming that I haven't blown the "math", I haven't noticed any glaring computational errors, where might the problem lie? Anyone have any ideas?

Thanks for attention, response, and any suggestions orcorrections.

Alan

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