NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
From: Frank Reed
Date: 2015 Sep 11, 11:42 -0700
David Fleming, you wrote:
"The essence of the problem as I see it is that the time of occultation depends on parallax. Otherwise you could not hope to determine your position from timing the occultation."
Well, consider the case of a much more distant occulting object. Then there would be no parallax to worry about, but we would still have a predictable event that would occur at an expected GMT. In fact, we have just such a case in the moons of Jupiter. Jupiter occults its moons (or they pass into its shadow --not quite the same thing) and with good enough ephemerides, these events are predictable. With a proper telescope, observing the eclipses and other events involving the moons provides a clock reading GMT in the sky.
Frank Reed
ReedNavigation.com
Conanicut Island USA
