Overwrought emotional language again, Patrick. No one cares how personally disgusted you are about Apollo, or how much you personally detest the astronauts. When you make emotionally-laden arguments, it reveals your position as intellectually and factually weak.
Then it's a good thing they didn't navigate by looking out the window. How many irrelevant comparisons are you going to post along these lines?
Explain how he would become dark-adapted while flying in a lighted spacecraft. Compute how much starlight is lost through atmospheric attenuation.
In other words, he reports that he is able to see his guide stars through the sextant -- the actual instrument used to take star sightings. Further, his description of the view through the sextant corresponds to the reports here of everyone who has made similar observations, the expectations of the design, and the needs of the mission.
The only material here that doesn't fit is your handwaving speculation for what the view "must" look like through the sextant: an unnavigable see of equally bright stars. When are you going to get it through your head that what you suppose to be true is not necessarily true? Have you figured out yet that the universe isn't obliged to conform to ignorant expectations?
Further, when Duke is describing performing the LM pre-launch alignment in the crew debriefing (p. 10-114), he confidently describes being able to identify and mark his guide stars, although he notes there is light pollution in some of the AOT detents. In other words, he reports what every astronomer reports about his experiences.
You quote a book you say was probably ghost-written, claiming that Duke couldn't see stars casually. From this you try to manufacture a dilemma about overall star visibility, or claim that navigation would have been impossible. But when Duke himself, in primary sources that you accept as authoritative, describes something different, you ignore it. Why? Because it doesn't fit what you've already decided you want to believe.
One only needs to locate stars when he is checking the platform alignment. When checking the alignment, one is looking through the sextant at bright guide stars.
You've already been busted for flip-flopping on the frequency of platform checks. You really need to go find out how often they really did check the IMU, and then you need to apply your allegedly superior mathematical skills and determine how much the platform had drifted in that interval. Then maybe you'll understand why it isn't strictly necessary for the navigator to be able to identify stars by constellation.
Yes, and so do all the relevantly qualified experts in the world. You -- the mere "layman with common sense" -- seem to be the only one having marked difficulty, and chiefly because we keep running up against things your "common sense" (i.e., uninformed intuition) isn't telling you.
You really don't get this. You would tell someone he's "lost" if he doesn't know whether he's on the south side of Main Street or the north side. You constantly inflate one astronaut's description after another in your quest to manufacture a discrepancy.
The "200 meter" estimate comes from the debriefing, where Duke estimated that based on known landmarks he'd seen while flying over, and John Young's callouts, they "had a good idea ... within a couple hundred meters" of where they'd landed. (ibid. p. 10-2)
Did they then go on to say that they were lost? Heavens, no! That's your interpretation of what actually happened -- your words, not theirs. Why are you always so reluctant to let your sources speak for themselves? Why must you rail-split and quote-mine them, and "summarize" them in your words (which inevitably changes the meaning)?
The astronauts went on to say that they found all the science stations they were supposed to visit on EVA-1. That is, they could use their LRV guidance system to find all the places the mission planners outlined for them. How would that constitute being "lost?"
No, once again what you're talking about is the effort to locate the LM right down to the meter. There is no magical guidance-system button you can push to get that. It has to be obtained by synthesis from various sources, each with its associated error. And that takes time. Going back to you Fattydash days, you still have not produce an error analysis for these methods to show that they should have been able to do what you say they could.
Months and months of you make the same claim, without showing that it is based on anything more substantial than your naive layman's expectations.
No, Patrick. You do not get to play the "poor, poor me!" card here. Not when you're willfully disregarding expert testimony, and when you're calling people like Steven Bales "perps" behind his back and don't have the nerve to address him in person. You voluntarily subject yourself to this study. There's no rhetorical mileage to be obtained over how distasteful it is. If you dislike Apollo, but want to study it anyway, then suck it up and quit complaining.