Why would the system need to have a much greater range of declination (celestial sphere) than latitude (Earth spheroid)? Because the Astro Tracker and Angle Computer could flip over to the Southern hemisphere (was this automatic or was there a switch?) having that much declination range seems unnecessary. Perhaps to allow for pitch of the aircraft in flight?
BTW, being able to operate in both the Northern & Southern hemispheres was an important capability for the B-52. Previous bombers (B-36 mostly) had the range but not the reliability or in-flight refueling for global reach.
Sadly, I didn't get the chance to look at the B-52 at the Museum of Flight when I was there. If you ever meet Charles Simonyi, please thank him for his support of the museum.
And here I am fighting gitlab pipelines.
One life to experience the universe. Save up for a sabbatical. Find new engineering pastures.
It's always rose colored looking back. Not everybody got to work on this. Some people were storming the beaches...
And other people, like Henry Kissinger, drew random dots on a map to tell it where to drop the bombs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Menu
> The Astro Compass needed to know approximately where in the sky to find the star, in order to point its sensor in the right direction. The direction didn't need to be exact because the Astro Compass performed a spiral search pattern to find the star. This search pattern covered ±4° in bearing and ±2.5° in altitude. In comparison, the Moon is 0.5° wide, so it's a fairly large target area. ↩
I think it provides ground track information not just heading? Which is far more valuable for aircraft navigation, because the main issue is unpredictable wind drift.
Really curious how they did this mechanically.
Auto manufacturers should take a clue here.
The 8-bit Guy recently released a video asking "What if everything still ran out vacuum tubes?" <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mEpnRM97ACQ>. Conclusion: A surprising amount of things we take for granted today would still be possible.