Gemini 7 Technical Debriefing, 1965

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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 bright light. Everytime you read the sextant
out you lost your dark adaptation because we were looking
at this whi te light.
And all it had to be,since the
spacecraft is dark anyway if you are l ooking a t stars,
is red, or dimmer l ight to read the angle out.
The r eticle was f ine during the first 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 reticl e. One of the big
things about the sextant, the mechanical aspects, was the
fact that the l ight was not split 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 control , 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 real 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