NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Re: Navigation without Leap Seconds
From: Bill Noyce
Date: 2008 Apr 18, 15:54 -0400
From: Bill Noyce
Date: 2008 Apr 18, 15:54 -0400
Leap seconds correct for variations (mostly the slowing down) in the rate of the Earth's rotation. I think everything else that's an input to the Nautical Almanac tabulations -- the Earth's orbit around the sun, and also the other planets, the Moon's orbit around the earth, proper motion of the stars, etc. -- is computed from the free-running time that ignores leap seconds. In a way, we're still clinging to the pardigm used in the Almanac's early days, when things were tabulated by Greenwich Apparent Time. Fortunately for navigation, and for Geoffrey's long-term almanac, most celestial objects don't move very much in a few seconds. Thus, for practical navigation, it doesn't matter whether we use UTC or the free-running clock for their positions. It *does* matter when we go to translate those positions into GHA. To answer the question that started the thread, I think future navigators will compute a position, then adjust their longitude. That uses (marginally) better positions for the celestial objects than the alternative, which would apply a sort of "equation of time" before looking up positions. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ Navigation List archive: www.fer3.com/arc To post, email NavList@fer3.com To , email NavList-@fer3.com -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---