Day 1

So far I've written a small toolset for making celestial calculations here: https://git.sr.ht/~tagglink/celestial-navigation-tools.

One task is to document what these tools do since right now I'm the only one who understands them. Another task is to actually make measurements of celestial altitudes along with timestamps so that I have some real data to calculate. For this, I signed up for a local makespace some time ago and today I used the laser cutter to make this wonderful thing:

It's a sine quadrant! You can use it not just to quickly calculate sine, but it doubles as a tool for measuring a rough altitude of a celestial body. At least that's the theory, once I have mounted a thread with a weight on it onto the origin point at the top left (if you look closely, I've prepared a small drill hole there.)

There's a great series of posts about the sine quadrant at The Astrolabe Project if you'd like to learn more: https://www.astrolabeproject.com/category/sine-quadrant/

This is also where I got the laser cutting file from. Thanks, Richard Wymark!