i'm not sure this is the right place for it, but i thought CN can be considered history, so here it is.

at a second hand shop i stumbled over a WW II aircraft sextant the other day. the item was way to expensive to buy just to find out how it works, but i got to read a bit of the manual, not that i understood it.

so, is anyone around here who could explain it?
i know how to use a marine sextant, but it seems to me that is a different world.

well, i know how to take a sight with a marine sextant, reduce it, how to read pup 229 and 249 to arrive at lines of position and so on.

that aircraft sextant doesn't even look like a sextant.

the type i'm speaking about looks more like a short periskope.
it has to have some sort of artifical horizon and an averager.
now i know a bubble sextant, but how should the averager work for example?

if it's a regular marine bubble sextant i can tell you how it works. if it's one similar to the one i described above i'm lost myself.

guess in that case wehave both the same problem

as i said, the problem is how to take sights, i'm aware that once i have the measured angle the procedure is tha same.

and ex-pat, i can tell you how get to a position from starsights, either using the publications i metioned above, or a calculator.
there's also a bunch of applets on the net that do the calculations.

the basic principle is to calculate the angle above the horizon the sun or other celestial body you want to use would have from an assumed position, then compare that angle with the measured angle and correct the position accordingly.
each sight gives a line of possible positions, after taking severall sights, where the lines cross is your positon.