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A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Lunar distance program for Windows: Lunar3
From: Paul Hirose
Date: 2013 Jun 13, 23:20 -0700
From: Paul Hirose
Date: 2013 Jun 13, 23:20 -0700
I'm about 200 years late to the method of lunar distances party, but better late than never. My free Windows program Lunar3 to solve lunar distance observations - the installer and Web documentation - went online tonight: http://home.earthlink.net/~s543t-24dst/lunar3/index.html It's version 1.0.0.0 (literally) so expect a few problems. The name is Lunar3 because it's based on two other programs which were never released. The program itself performs well and I have made no bug fixes in more than a month. The Web pages could be written better. (I just noticed the first paragraph on the main page does not end with a period. Grrr.) But I've been working hard on that stuff for several days and I'm sick of looking at it. After what I've written on dip, there may be some surprise the program's dip correction uses the simple formula in the Nautical Almanac. I almost didn't include even that much! When the recent dip discussion began, Lunar3 was practically complete and in test. I did not want to add another feature. That stuff can go on forever unless you learn to say NO to yourself. But I found a way to add the simple correction with a few lines of code in safe places where I didn't have to worry about unintended side effects. The program was developed on my old XP machine. I can't guarantee it will install successfully in other Windows versions. --