Misura del ritardo accumulato dalla rotazione terrestre, DUT1, alla meridiana clementina della Basilica di Santa Maria degli Angeli in Roma

TL;DR

This paper describes the use of the historic Clementine Gnomon in Rome to measure DUT1, the delay of solar meridian transit times relative to ephemerides, with high accuracy, contributing to understanding Earth's rotation variations.

Contribution

It presents a novel application of a historic solar meridian instrument to accurately measure DUT1 and analyze Earth's rotational variations.

Findings

DUT1 measured with an accuracy of ±0.3 seconds.

The azimuth of the Gnomon is precisely referenced to celestial North.

DUT1 was approximately 0.7 seconds on December 31, 2008.

Abstract

The Clementine Gnomon is a solar meridian telescope dedicated to solar astrometry operating as a giant pinhole dark camera, being the basilica of Santa Maria degli Angeli the dark room. This instrument built in 1701-1702 by the will of pope Clement XI by Francesco Bianchini (1662-1729) gives solar images free from distortions, excepted atmospheric refraction, because the pinhole is opticsless. Similar historical instruments are in Florence (Duomo, by Toscanelli and Ximenes), Bologna (San Petronio, by Cassini), Milan (Duomo, by De Cesaris) and Palermo (Cathedral, by Piazzi). The azimut of the Clementine Gnomon has been recently referenced with respect to the celestial North pole, and it is 4'28.8"\pm0.6", a comparison with similar coeval instruments is presented. Also the local deviations from a perfect line are known with an accuracy better than 0.5 mm. With these calibration data we used the Gnomon to measure the delay of the solar meridian transit with respect to the time calculated by the ephemerides (DUT1). The growth of this astronomical parameter is compensated by the insertion of a leap second ad the end of the year in order to keep the Universal Time close to astronomical phenomena within less than a whole second. On December 31, 2008 at 23:59:59 there is one of those leap seconds leading to 23:59:60 before the new year's midnight 00:00:00, being DUT1\approx0.7 s at that date. DUT1 has been measured with an accuracy of \pm0.3 s.