A General Relativistic Model of Light Propagation in the Gravitational Field of the Solar System: The Dynamical Case

Modern astrometry is based on angular measurements at the micro-arcsecondlevel. At this accuracy a fully general relativistic treatment of the datareduction is required. This paper concludes a series of articles dedicated tothe problem of relativistic light propagation, presenting the finalmicroarcsecond version of a relativistic astrometric model which enable us totrace back the light path to its emitting source throughout the non-stationarygravity field of the moving bodies in the Solar System. The previous model isused as test-bed for numerical comparisons to the present one. Here we alsotest different versions of the computer code implementing the model atdifferent levels of complexity to start exploring the best trade-off betweennumerical efficiency and the micro-arcsecond accuracy needed to be reached.Comment: 40 pages, 5 figures. Accepted for publication on The Astrophysical Journal. Manuscript prepared with AASLaTeX macros v.5.