He has never seen more perfect optical definition in any of the many telescopes he has employed, and certainly never measured a celestial object in such favourable conditions of physical comfort.
The problem of determining the zenith distance of a celestial object now reduces itself to that of measuring the angle between the direction of the object and the direction of the vertical line realized in one of these ways.
The angular motion of the telescope in passing from this position to that when the celestial object is in the line of sight is the distance (ND) of the body from the nadir.
Measures made on the various systems which we have described give the apparent direction of a celestial object as seen by the observer.
The latitude of a celestial object is the angle which the line drawn from some fixed point of reference to the object makes with the plane of the ecliptic.
