Eye-to-ear method

This article or the following section is not adequately provided with supporting documents ( e.g. individual evidence ). Information without sufficient evidence could be removed soon. Please help Wikipedia by researching the information and including good evidence.

The eye-ear method is a method of time measurement that has long been tried and tested in astronomy , in which the reaction time of the observer, which is determined by the personal equation , plays a relatively minor role.

The event, the exact time of which is to be measured - for example a star passage - is traditionally estimated in the stroke of a precision pendulum clock . The correlation of the face with the hearing sense causes the response delay is relatively small.

Experienced observers can estimate the fractions of a second in the pendulum beats to be 0.05 s, a beginner at least 0.1 to 0.2 seconds. So the method is usually better than with a stopwatch and the time announcement . The method for measuring star locations was already used around 300 years ago . Today the time signal transmitters controlled by atomic clocks can easily replace the pendulum clock.