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Re: Artificial horizon
From: Alexandre Eremenko
Date: 2005 Feb 20, 13:24 -0500
From: Alexandre Eremenko
Date: 2005 Feb 20, 13:24 -0500
Dear George, Thank you for your interesting info on art horizons. > That's why the other (Norwegian?) type of artificial horizon, I've seen pictures of them in the books only. Are they still available? Theoretically, it seems to me that this model should be preferred for land observations. With my liquid art horizon I had a funny accident when I tried to use it first. Once I took a series of Sun altitudes which looked very good (very little scattering in the series) but when reduced showed a systematic error of about 2 degrees. It took me a while to figure out what was going on:-) My art horizon stands on an iron table with glass top. I confised the Sun reflection from this glass top with reflection from the art horizon:-) Then an idea came to fix a good optical quality mirror permanently in horizontal position, and use it as an artificial horizon. I am sure that there are bubble levels of sufficient precision to do this: they use such levels in transit instruments, don't they? So it seems that a mirror-type art horizon would be much more convenient for land observations. Are they still produced? Alex.