NavList:

Steve,

You are quite right to spot a problem here. Of course, it is trivial to say that meridian transit of any given body happens at the same time for all observers on the same meridian. But for the navigator, the observable event is culmination, not transit. For a body with variable declination such as the sun, the time of culmination is indeed affected by the observer's latitude - to the extend that the method of the classical noon observation will break down near the pole. North of 89 deg, the time between transit and culmination can exceed many minutes, and thus also the time between the observed culminations by two observers on the same meridian. Besides the theoretical problem you will also face the practical one that at some point the observable will get lost in the noise.

Herbert Prinz