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Dear fellow list members,

I recently found an atricle which seems
very disturbing to me:
"Refraction near the horizon" by Schaefer and Liller,
Publ. Astr. Soc. Pacific.
You can read the paper on
http://www.math.purdue.edu/~eremenko/dip.pdf
The main point of the article is that the refraction
near the horizon (and thus the dip of the horizon)
varies unpredictably and the variation is enormous.

The authors do not discuss Cel Nav in this paper,
their main concern is refuring "Archaeoastronomy".

I don't care about Archaeoastronomy, but their main
conclusions seem to imply that the refraction
near the horizon (and thus the dip) is uncertain
to more than 1/2 of a degree.

Then how is traditional CelNav based on altitude measurements
possible at all?

Any comments?

Alex.

   

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