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Abstract
The displacement of star images by atmospheric refraction observed by an Earth-bound
telescope is dominated by a familiar term proportional to the tangent of the zenith
angle and proportional to the refractivity at the ground.
The manuscript focuses on the torsion of the ray path through the atmosphere in a
model of ellipsoidal atmospheric layers above the Earth surface, induced by the two
slightly different principal curvatures along N-S and E-W pointing directions, depending
on the geodetic latitude of the telescope site. This symmetry breaking effects apparent
places in the sub-milliarcsecond range at optical and infrared wavelengths.