For a rough determination; you are facing due south, or due north when the
elevation of a celestial body stops increasing with time. The elevation is
highest when the body is on the observer's local meridian. There are
exceptions, for instance when observing a body below Polaris, then the body
reaches the lowest elevation when crossing the observer's local meridian,
but reaches its highest elevation twelve sidereal hours later.
John WA4WDL
--------------------------------------------------
But how do you untangle longitude and time? How do you know that you are
looking exactly south (or north)?
If I understand what you are asking, it's the same problem as navigating
a
ship without a clock.
Classic navigation with a sextant needs a clock and sightings on 3
objects
in
the sky. Each sighting gives you a circle on the globe, or a line if
you
know roughly where you are. The lines form a triangle. The size of the
triangle is an indication of the accuracy. You pick the objects so the
triangle is roughly equilateral.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celestial_navigation
You can get time from the moon, so in theory at least, that's an answer
to
your question.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_distance_%28navigation%29
Years ago, when a friend was learning navigation, he was reading one of
the
old classic texts. There was a good story about the guy off the coast of
England/Ireland who didn't trust his clock, so he did the calculations
again
assuming his clock was a bit fast and again with it slow. That gave him
3
parallel lines for each sighting. Anybody recognize that story?
Longitude by Dava Sobel is a good read, especially for time-nuts. There
is
also a version with lots of good photographs.
One of the techniques they actually considered before Harrison built good
enough clocks was to derive time from Jupiter's moons. They knew enough
to
correct for the time shift due to speed of light delays as the
Earth-Jupiter
distance changed. (I don't know if they knew if was due to speed of
light.)
You can synchronize two clocks if both sites can see the same event in
the
sky, Occultations are often used for this.
With modern technology, radio telescopes are very very good at this. In
order to do VLBI, you need to know where the telescopes are located.
With
a
big collection of data you can do least-squared fit type calculations to
refine the location and clock calibration.
--
These are my opinions, not necessarily my employer's. I hate spam.
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