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Old 16th Sep 2009, 11:30
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mathy
 
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can't find my air almanac

Going back to the idea of "Rule of Thumb" I think it is more difficult than you might think.

I could not find a copy of the Air Almanac and also looked in vain for a small booklet by Peter Duffett-Smith called "Practical Astronomy with Your calculator". That had useful equations and a piece about the equation of time. This latter equation is a sort post hoc stab at the way the earth is orbiting with an estimate for the next year and was pretty vital in the days before atomic clocks.

There certainly used to be in the Air Almanac data for the extension of daylight according to latitude and height amsl. The following link NOAA Improved Sunrise/Sunset Calculation is handy, particularly with regard to refraction in air but takes no account of height. I have an old wartime copy of AP1234 which shows this seasonal variation Jan-Dec for Latitude 50 deg and its big... 22mins either way and that surely swamps refraction. But not dip, the angle of depression of the sun below true horizon. Using a maritime sextant reliant on shooting the horizon there is a dip correction for refraction which must be subtracted. Back in WW2 and immediately post-war when bubble sextants were used in aircraft there is no dip horizon correction for refraction but there is one to be subtracted for the altitude of the sun just as for a maritime sextant. Except that this refractive correction varies strongly with height.

But going back to the rule of thumb, no, can't think of one principally because the extension of daylight with latitude is a "sinusoidal" seasonal variation complicated by dip with actual height and prevailing refraction.

Stephen Michael Schimpf makes or made available a handy bit of software called Cybersky which should be good for sunrise sunset prediction and if the Air Almanac still has tables of daylight extension for height and latitude that is probably the best that can be done. Hardly a rule of thumb. Though a wild-assed guess might be on a "typical" commercial flight you can expect sunrise to be 10-20 minutes earlier than sea level almanac figures and similarly for sunset 10-20 minutes later.

I wish I could have found something simple and easy but it has been fun trying.
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