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A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Re: Dip by sextant and systematic error
From: Marcel Tschudin
Date: 2013 Apr 2, 21:40 +0300
From: Marcel Tschudin
Date: 2013 Apr 2, 21:40 +0300
Frank, you wrote:
Let's be very clear on this: the SINGLE BIGGEST UNCERTAINTY in standard line of position celestial navigation (or any celestial navigation that is equivalent to LOP celestial) is the uncertainty of the horizon --the variability of dip. ... And there is nothing that can be done about this. It can be interesting (and "fun" as you said a while back) to observe this variability to get some real sense of how large the effect is. But "solving" this problem is a wild goose chase. And it's a goose that the developers of navigational methods have been chasing for over 200 years!
I agree with the wild goose chase. However, I think that the availability of environmental (atmospheric) data and of analytical tools have improved over the past 200 years. One may therefore hope to derive from a sufficiently large set of observations some improved estimation methods. Even if one would not arrive at an improved estimation one could at least *show* how it scatters.
Marcel
