Does anyone here know the current state of the art for timing the Earth's rotation? I know the outline, An instrument on a transit telescope notes the time when a star passes overhead. You take many of these observations and you can determine the period
What is the instrument of choice? Is it still a transit telescope or do that track a star's motion over a longer span of time? I'd guess that getting a good rotational period would required tracking many stars over months and years. What about effects like parallax due to the Earth's orbit around the sun,? Do they only use very distant stars? Or do they use radio telescopes now. If I were doing this in my backyard on a budget I'd mount a small telescope nearly straight up so that a bright star would pass through the field on several nights. I'd measure the light of the star through a slit and time the peak of the light each night. I bet I could get to about a microsecond. I'm wondering what professionals are doing in this field. -- ===== Chris Albertson Redondo Beach, California _______________________________________________ time-nuts mailing list -- [email protected] To unsubscribe, go to https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts and follow the instructions there.
