Gemini 7 Technical Debriefing, 1965

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151
Lovell
Borman
Lovell
Borman ·
Lovell
On no Moon nights, the whole ai r glow layer seemed to be
of the same consista.ncy.
And the sharpest part was t he
upper air glow l ayer where we could bring stars down to it.
Did you f ind it difficult at times to get the stars
acquir ed at the angle?
Right.
We found out, due to the window design, tllat if
the stars were not lined vertically with one another, if
we were taking star to star shots or star to Moon shots,
i t was hard to get the sextant lined up.
The best way to
hold the sextant was t he way it was developed originally,
just up a.nd down. If you had to move it around here to
get a star over here,or horizontal
or angle shots,
you had to move the spacecraft around to get the window
in line, to get all the view.
Now we ooul d shoot angl es
up to about I think 45 degrees, if we had the right window
alignment and had bright enough stars. But anything above
that and most of the time around 35 to 40 degrees, one of
the two, either the upper prism or the l ower t elescope
woul d get in the way of the rim of the window and get
lost to view.
Then we couldn't do anything with it.
I remember there were a couple of t imes when you picked
up the wrong star too.
Yes.