NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Re: Timing Upper Limb Sunset by Camera
From: Bill B
Date: 2015 Apr 16, 13:35 -0400
From: Bill B
Date: 2015 Apr 16, 13:35 -0400
On 4/8/2015 2:01 PM, Greg Rudzinski wrote: ...The NC-77 uses the > Radau model. Not sure what the Palm Pilot uses. USNO doesn't provide 0° > refraction data :( Hard to say what qualifies as good on these > sunset horizon sights.. To finish up on "Find Greg:" Attached was my final go at the exercise. It is "wishful thinking." I placed an AP in the center of brackets that would be the upper and lower limits of rounding fractional GPS lat and lon up or down to whole tenths yielding N34 03!2 W118 57!7 displayed on your smartphone. (In essence anything within a box plus or minus 0!05 lat and lon from the smartphone yet on the highway, closely approximating the center point of a 0!05 COP intersecting the highway.) There is evidence to support a possible HE of 55' or greater assuming the eye is 8' above the road when seated on a Greyhound on that stretch of road. Radau model? Had to Google that. Above my pay grade. :-) For refraction I used -49!7, the refraction average from being on the cusp of NA -49!8 and -49!6. What qualifies as a good sunset horizon sight? Approximately 1 nm from the AP on a bus with a camera sounds damned good to me. Nice shooting! When I started cel nav with HO229 I was trying to figure out how to use the tables for a UL sunset with binoculars. I turned to the group for help. The consensus was it was mostly fruitless as changes in refraction could alter the event by minutes, and the upper limb would be extinguished by the atmosphere so not visible at the moment it hit the horizon. Hypothetically if refraction was in fact -49!7 and your observation time was approx 5 seconds early, then (all other things being equal) it would amount to an intercept increase of approx. 1!0 towards from AP. That would move the LOP up the coast from the AP (west and/or north when declination is N), which is exactly what I see.