Wednesday, December 24, 2008

The Hour Angle!

Today, while calmly seated in the couch of our hotel room 315 (where I'm writing this, actually), I finally understood why my last attempt at pointing the telescope alone did not succeed at first.
We had been told to consult a given IAC site for calculation of the Hour Angle (HA). But, if I happen to know the real Hour Angle, why should I need to use that site? - I though.
The trouble was that my Hour Angle values did not match up with the ones that were the "correct" ones. I noted that there were 2 hours difference in them. This did not make sense, as the Hour Angle I had in mind was being correctly calculated based on longitude of the site. This made me lose confidence in pointing with my calculated HA.

The Hour Angle is a local time-invariant angle coordinate useful for pointing at something in the sky. This angle is dependent on the position of the observer around the Earth (Longitude) and on time. The value of the Hour Angle when pointing at the vertical at observer's location (or anywhere on the local meridian) is zero 00:00 (or 12:00, when you are using an equatorial mount with the scope on the East of it, pointing West).

I decided to download the javascript calculator, and edit it to make it less annoying for personal use on my laptop, inside the dome. It was only now that I noticed the small letters at the bottom of the page that say "Estos cálculos ya tienen incluido el ERROR en Ángulo Horario (1h 55,5m)".
So there is a capital-lettered ERROR on the AH coordinate circle of the telescope of nearly 2 hours! So finally now I understood why the HA coordinate don't match right. I was doing it right all along, and the problem was not me.

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