Analysis of star pair latitudes

Abstract

Star pair latitude observations forming the basis for the pole positions reported by the International Polar Motion Service (IPMS) are processed to produce a mean pole position. However, the time series of raw observations contains high frequency information which is lost in the calculation of the mean pole. Analysis of 2931 star pair observations reveals a possible large excitation at one cycle per solar day. The average power level in the frequency band of the tesseral tides is seen to be high, although the peaks do not occur at the expected tidal frequencies.