NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
From: Robin Stuart
Date: 2010 May 10, 17:22 -0700
Paul,
As pointed out by George, the altitudes your program is calculating appear to be way off. Based on your quoted values of
hc (Moon) = 20�33.9'
hc (Jupiter) = 22�02.6'
one can do a double altitude sight calculation and come up with possible
positions at 9�47.8'S 146�45.8'E or 13�44.3S 77�09.3'W. You can check these values by plugging them and your observation time of 18:15:52 UT into http://aa.usno.navy.mil/cgi-bin/aa_flamenav.pl so it doesn't look like a simple typo in your input position. If the altitudes are wrong then the corrections for refraction, parallax, augmentation will all be off.
The good news is that your program returns a cleared lunar distance of 7�28.5' and the geocentric distance between the centres of the Moon and Jupiter was indeed that at 2h 57m 42m and again some time between 21h 21m 30s and 45s. The point of closest approach was around 12h12m UT which would have been a particularly bad time to shoot a lunar,
Regards,
Robin Stuart
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