Granted. Sometimes there are distant clouds on the horizon that obscure the sunrise when it is clear overhead.

But astronomy IS a very exact science. I'm sure you have heard of GOTO telescopes which once calibrated with their location and the time, can point exactly to thousands of targets stored in their internal databases. They could not possibly work if anything in the sky was the least bit out of place or moving unpredictably. For instance, most of the deep-space objects I photograph cannot even be seen through the scope visually and I have to rely on the GOTO accuracy of my scope to frame each object in the camera. If the sky was not precisely predicatble, this would be impossible. Likewise, I expose for sometimes hours at a time...if my permanent scope mount were not exactly parallel to the rotational axis of the earth, long exposure photography would be impossible. There are those on GLP who claim that the moon is out of place, yet I can command my scope to point to not only the moon, but to any one of several hundred individual craters on it and have it slew exactly to the target. The same goes for the planets and asteroids. The scope has no way of seeing what it is pointing to. Can you explain how it could possibly slew exactly to targets if the earth and sky were not as they should be?