When I first started thinking about how an observing team would work, I originally envisioned two people being necessary, with three being ideal. The thought was that one person would use the sight to locate the star as it crossed the meridian, a second would read the observation off the scale aloud, and a third would record it in a log book. If necessary the second person could do the writing.
This division of duties well matches an engraving Tycho had of his mural quadrant:
If we ignore the giant Tycho in the background as this is a heavily stylized image, we see the observer at far right sighting the star, one reading off the time, and a third recording the observation.
However, the past few days I’ve been working on a list of stars to observe and think it may be necessary for my purposes to have even more.
The reason is that, at present, I have about 350 stars on my list to observe. These stars are all brighter than 4th magnitude so easily visible to the naked eye under fairly dark skies.
If I sort the list by right ascension, this effectively sorts the list by when they will transit the meridian, and since RA is expressed in hours, minutes, and seconds, the difference between their RAs tells how long between observations.
Tycho, a true nobleman who, while fastidious about his observations, had all the time in the world to make them. He could, and certainly did, simply focus on a few stars at a time.
Meanwhile, I don’t intend to set up my quadrant every clear night so I will need to maximize my observing time with an exceptionally rigorous schedule, trying to hit every target star nearly every time it passes the meridian.
There’s a few immediate challenges to this. The most obvious is that knowing which star is next is not exactly easy. While the person in charge of records could certainly inform the observer that the next target is δ Geminorum, I don’t have the designations or names of several hundred stars memorized and I certainly can’t expect any volunteers to either.
Thus, I’m beginning to think that there should be a line of observers. While they wait in line, they should be working on finding their target star from a star map, so when it comes time to step up and make their observation, they know what they’re shooting for. However, if they’ve just used artificial lighting to read a star map, their dark vision may be shot. Hopefully if I limit the lighting to a candle, it will be easier.
Second, not all stars will be on the same half of the sky; some will be in the north, some in the south. Fortunately, the type of quadrant I’ve built works for both simultaneously with a bit of extra work. It would still be aligned with the meridian by sighting the north star, but sights can be added to the other side and, if used, the angle would 90º minus the reading.
The other option is to only do one half of the sky on a given night and then hope it’s clear the next night. Doing so would slow the pace of observations since only ~50% of the stars would be on the list for a given night.
Hopefully we can get the logistics figured out quickly once we get going.