NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Re: Sextant Accuracy and anomalous dip
From: Fred Hebard
Date: 2003 Mar 21, 22:18 -0500
From: Fred Hebard
Date: 2003 Mar 21, 22:18 -0500
Bruce raises the intriguing point that the people who established the cable station could get time over the wire to establish its location. However, why couldn't the repair ship do the same? Surely the time of the captain and first officer over a half day to a whole day was more valuable than a few time transmissions. I hazard that the delays in propagating a signal were unknown enough that accurate time could not be transmitted long distance. This leads us back to Jared's question, where they did seem to be establishing their observatory in a random spot. However, perhaps it wasn't too difficult to measure the distance to a known spot in the vicinity, or perhaps the spots were known and had been located by observing the moons of Jupiter or some such. Fred Hebard