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Re: Celestial navigation: easier basic principle?
From: Peter Monta
Date: 2020 Jan 26, 18:59 -0800
From: Peter Monta
Date: 2020 Jan 26, 18:59 -0800
Hi Bruce,
Why is it unlikely that any bright star will be within an arc minute of zenith?
Now I'm thinking that you and/or the original poster may be using "zenith" in the archaic sense of "at culmination".
But if we're all talking about the zenith as "up", or "opposite the gravity vector", then at any given place and time the bright stars, of which there are only a few dozen or hundred, will be unlikely to find themselves that close to the zenith. It's just statistics. There are about 70 million square arcminutes in the hemisphere, if my arithmetic is right, so for one of the 100 bright stars to be in the magic square at the zenith, it's like winning the lottery.
Cheers,
Peter
