Gemini 7 Technical Debriefing, 1965

149
was fine , the stop watch was an excellent idea. The
lighting on the sextant angle reading was too bright . It
was a whi te bri ght light. Everytime you read the sextant
out you lost your dark adaptation because we were looking
at this whi te light. And al l it had to be,since the
spacecraft is dark anyway if you are l ooking a t stars,
is red, or dimmer l i ght to read the angle out .
The r eticle was f i n e during the f irst pa.rt of the flight,
and then f or some reason it became a double i mage . I
found out that I never used the reticle during the full
M.oo.n or eve.n at hal f Moon I could see the dark lines
without having to light up the retic l e. One of t he big
things about the sextant, the mechanical aspects , was t he
fact that the l ight was not spli t 50- 50 between the upper
prism and the lower telescope. It was a 20-80 split and
therefore one image woul d be bright and the other one dim.
This was fine if you went from the start of the horizon
where you would have a bright star a.nd a dim hori zon.
You had a contro l , but if you went from, say, two stars
to measure the angle between two stars to check the al i gn
ment of a sextant, (because the angl es are already known)
one star woul d be bright and the other star rea l dim
if you got them within a certain angl e of each other. But
as soon as you got that other dim star, then the bright