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Bill, you wrote:
"I let go of your Chicago  observations"

They're not dead yet!

Just today, I finally got  around to measuring the heights of the towers in
question above lake level --the  results are suprising. Damn near froze my
fingers off --I parked too far away  and forgot my gloves. But it's all coming
together quite nicely. The  observations on that day in late September from the
beach in Indiana are  consistent with the refraction from a moderate
temperature inversion and  distinctly *IN*consistent with Bowditch Table XV. I'll get
into the details as  time permits.

Before I forget (again), I wanted to mention that the "lean  back" of the
buildings from the curvature of the Earth, which was something you  were
concerned about, should be entirely insignificant. If a flagpole is 20  nautical miles
away from me, then it is tipped away from my vertical by 20  minutes of arc
almost exactly. The difference in angular apparent height from  that tilt is
going to be proportional to the cosine of 20 arcminutes which  differs from
unity by about one part in 60,000, so a one degree high skyscraper  20 miles in
the distance is shorter in apparent angular height by a thousandth  of a minute
of arc because of that "lean back". The standard calculations can,  and do,
account for this effect (implicitly), but even if they didn't, it  wouldn't
matter.

And yet another "before I forget", Lake Michigan is not  sinking. The level
fluctuates a lot, and yes very recently there have been some  down-trending
years, but those boaters you mentioned who are convinced that it  is draining
away because the piers are inconveniently high are wrong --it's  urban legend.
The harbor builders built the piers years ago well above the  fluctuations
*intentionally*. When you live on a body of water with natural  level fluctuations,
it's much easier to deal with harbor infrastructure that  ends up too high
for convenient use than it is to deal with infrastructure that  is underwater!

-FER
42.0N 87.7W, or 41.4N  72.1W.
www.HistoricalAtlas.com/lunars

   

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