NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
From: Frank Reed
Date: 2017 Dec 1, 09:55 -0800
Greg Rudzinski, you wrote:
"Not sure how tall Santa is but lets say his height of eye is 6 ft. with boots on."
But he lives in a towering castle, known as the Fortress of Solitude, and, as we all know, he sleeps in the tallest tower at an altitude of 500 cubits above the ice, and he can see the upper limb of the Sun at least a day earlier than the elven hordes groveling on the ice below. But Professor Claus is aware of the variable effect of altitude on the dip of the horizon as well as the highly variable refraction in the high Arctic. The light of the visible spectrum fools mere mortals, but not a man with Kryptonian x-ray vision. Further, since Saint Nicholas learned his astronomy before the year 300 AD (a little more than a century after Ptolemy), I have no doubt --no doubt whatsoever!-- that the Claus would use a transcendent celestial definition of sunrise unaffected by mundane influences like height of eye and the weather. His definition of sunrise would match a definition that was common before the 20th century: the instant when the center of the Sun reaches a true altitude of zero degrees. Naturally at the north pole, this occurs exactly when the Sun crosses the celestial equator, therefore the date is the spring equinox of the current year! Cogito ergo Santa.
For your mashup pleasure: Santa's Super Neighbor (possibly NSFW).
Frank Reed
