Gemini 7 Technical Debriefing, 1965

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star, you could not tell when they were over lapping.
Lovell
You had to have two stars of the same magnitude in lock.
So, I had practi ced and trained in the one with the
50- 50 split which I thought was a lot better than this
20-80 which we f i nal ly ended up with.
And this also is
true when you t ook star t o Moon limb shots because they
had it arra~.ged that most of the light ca.me from the Moon.
Eighty percent of the light passage was from the Moon and
they had f ilters t o cut that down.
And 20 percent came from
the star .
Well, the filters were not dark enough for
the Moo.n, and as soon as you got those stars somewhere near
the limb they just faded out of view. You coul d not see
it so you had a hard time getting star to Moon limb shots .
Lovell
We noticed one big thing in navigation with the sextant.
Wi th a ful l Moon , you a ~e going t o have a hard time using
the stars under the Moon. It just blanks out the light.
I t
is just too bright, i t dims the stars and rui.ns your dark
adaptation.
On no Moo.n nights or quarter Moon nights, most
of the stars come out and the na.vigatio.n i s a lot better.
We found out al so on full Moon nights as we said before, that
we'd use the bottom Earth's hori zon, whi ch i s probably an
upper air horizon and had the sharpest l i ne of i dentification
f or angles.