Apparent Places with an Ellipsoidal Geometry of Refraction in the Earth's Atmosphere

2009/07/06 by Richard J. Mathar, Mathar, Richard J.
Engineering · Physics and Astronomy · Social Sciences · #FOS: Physical sciences #Historical Geography and Cartography #Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics (astro-ph.IM) #Radio Wave Propagation Studies #Satellite Image Processing and Photogrammetry #astro-ph.IM

paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.0907.1104

Replaced numerical integration over atmospheric layers by analytic expansions of some integrals

openalex publication_date 2009/07/06 · arxiv created 2015/02/27 · arxiv updated 2015/03/02 · openalex created_date 2016/06/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28

Abstract

The displacement of star images by atmospheric refraction observed by an Earth-bound telescope is dominated by a familiar term proportional to the product of the tangent of the zenith angle by the refractivity at the ground. The manuscript focuses on the torsion of the ray path through the atmosphere in a model of atmospheric layers above the ellipsoidal Earth surface, induced by the two slightly different principal curvatures along N--S and E--W pointing directions. This breaking of the azimuthal symmetry effects apparent places at the sub-milliarcsecond scale at optical and infrared wavelengths.

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