NavList:

D Walden, you wrote:

"I'll see if I can get over there in the next few days, unless someone
else finds it sooner."

 

Thanks for the offer. Richard Langley has sent me a copy. As it turns out, it's an interesting article though only tangentially related to what I've been discussing. The fascinating aspect is that the author does a nice job explaining how to track the Moon at one arcsecond accuracy, with automated telescopes aboard a missile, using technology available in 1950. It's rather impressive that it's possible at all. At this level of accuracy, you have to worry about the fact that the Moon's visible center is not quite the same as its center of mass. You also have to worry about a couple of arcseconds of aberration of light arising from the missile's high speed of travel. Thompson correctly concludes that it's not worth exploring the question further, even though the technology might be feasible, since the technique would only work when the Moon is in the sky. You can imagine the problem: "I'm sorry, sir, we cannot launch a counter-strike until the Moon is at least five days old..."

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