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A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Re: getting GHA from MICA
From: Paul Hirose
Date: 2014 Mar 19, 20:03 -0700
From: Paul Hirose
Date: 2014 Mar 19, 20:03 -0700
I wrote: > For instance, at 2014 March 19 at 1700 UT1, compare Moon LHA from N89 59 > 59 W000 00 00 to a GHA computed by subtracting the geocentric apparent > RA from Greenwich apparent sidereal time. > > 220 01 11.6 topocentric LHA > 220 01 11.5 RA - GAST Last line should say GAST - RA, as the paragraph above says. The topocenter should be near a pole to minimize parallax, because you are trying to emulate a geocentric observation. Of course an observation at a pole has parallax too, but the observer's displacement from the geocenter is along Earth's axis. Therefore hour angle is not affected. A terrestrial analogy is observing an azimuth from ground level vs. from a tower directly above. Elevation is different, but not azimuth. I chose the Moon for my example to make this more critical. The Moon's maximum parallax is about one degree. MICA is (or was, last time I looked) claimed to be suitable for celestial navigation. But unless improvments have been made, it gives unrefracted zenith distance in DMS.s format, a far cry from the refracted DM.m altitude a navigator needs. Tinyac, with its elaborate coordinate system options, was inspired by my disappointment with MICA. --