History
The International Polar Motion Service program was created by the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey in 1899 to study the precession, or "wobble" of the Earth's axis, and its effect on measures of latitude. Six separate observatories were created along the parallel 39° 08' north latitude. The alignment of all six stations along the parallel helped the observatories to perform uniform data analysis. Twelve groups of stars were studied in the program, each group containing six pairs of stars. Each night, each station observed two of the star groups along a preset schedule and later compared the data against the measurements taken by the sister stations.
Economic difficulties and war caused the closings of some of the original stations, though a newer station was created in Uzbekistan after World War I. The various stations continued to function until advances in computer technology and satellite observations rendered them obsolete in 1982. The data collected by the observatories over the years still has use to scientists, and has been applied to studies of polar motion, the physical properties of the Earth, climatology and satellite tracking and navigation.
The final six observatories were located, in order of Longitude (E to W), in:
- Gaithersburg, Maryland, USA, Gaithersburg Latitude Observatory: N 39:08:12.51 W 77:11:55.85
- Cincinnati, Ohio, USA: N 39:08.3 W 84:25.4
- Ukiah, California, USA: N 39:08:14.26 W 123:12:42.54
- Mizusawa, Japan, National Institutes of Natural Sciences National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, Mizusawa VERA Observatory: N 39:08.1 E 141:07.9
- Kitab, in Uzbekistan: N 39:08.0 E 66:52.9
- Carloforte, Italy: N 39:08:13.76 E 8:18:41.90
Read more about this topic: International Latitude Observatory
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“We said that the history of mankind depicts man; in the same way one can maintain that the history of science is science itself.”
—Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (1749–1832)
“There is a constant in the average American imagination and taste, for which the past must be preserved and celebrated in full-scale authentic copy; a philosophy of immortality as duplication. It dominates the relation with the self, with the past, not infrequently with the present, always with History and, even, with the European tradition.”
—Umberto Eco (b. 1932)
“If usually the “present age” is no very long time, still, at our pleasure, or in the service of some such unity of meaning as the history of civilization, or the study of geology, may suggest, we may conceive the present as extending over many centuries, or over a hundred thousand years.”
—Josiah Royce (1855–1916)