NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
A small puzzle
From: Geoffrey Kolbe
Date: 2000 Sep 11, 12:40 AM
From: Geoffrey Kolbe
Date: 2000 Sep 11, 12:40 AM
I sent a message privately to Rick Emerson, offering a low sea mist on the horizon as a possible solution to the problem. Rick asked that this exchange be copied to the list - so here it is! ----------------------------------8<-------------------------------------- > Rick. > > Thanks for your interesting puzzle. > > You say the horizon was clear, but you seemed also to think it worth > waiting for a lighter horizon to take the Jupiter and Moon sightings, so > you cannot have been entirely happy with the horizon. Um, perhaps I was a bit unclear (no pun intended) about the horizon issue. I knew I'd still be able to shoot Jupiter fairly close to sunrise and, of course, the Moon would be usable well past that. Waiting for a better horizon was more a matter of being dead sure about the horizon instead of "merely" sure. > So what about the possibility of a low sea mist on the horizon at > the time of your star sight, which had dissipated when the planet > sightings were taken, or was simply local to that particular > azimuth bearing of 110 degrees? Now, this is, of course, a possibility as is, as best I can recall, the (greater?) chance I mistakenly used a low cloud bank as the horizon. The dawn sky was generally clear (we'd had a cold front pass through the day before to clear things out and the evening stars session from the preceeding evening was a case of "so many stars, so little time") but it's entirely possible that what I took to be the horizon was, in fact, a cloud bank close to the horizon. I'll go back and play with the numbers a bit to see if that resolves the problem. Also, for the record, I checked Betelgeuse this past Saturday morning and I'm confident that's the star I shot. Rick S/V One With The Wind, Baba 35