NavList:

Hello again Alex,

As regards the so-called "3-d version of Frank's calculator", you did notice that one sentence of my previous post was published as incomplete. I actually used a "no no" sign, namely the one you use when writing "at" in e-mail addresses. This "at" symbol produced some unexpected effects and as a consequence one sentence of my previous post got modified. Frank had warned us about this at some earlier time.

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What I actually wanted to write is the following question to Frank : "Was Version 3 of your Lunar Calculator not upgraded into Version 4 lately, i.e. less than 1 year ago ?"

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As I can remember, various versions of Frank's Computer have been put on line in the past. Each one has replaced and has been an improvement over the previous ones thanks to some "side features" added over the past years. Just one example : in one previous version, you could enter Lunar distances only to full tenths of arc minutes, while now you can enter them to +/- 0'01. This feature can be useful if for example you are using averaged values (which I actually have in your Lunars examples to-day). As regards Ephemeris accuracy, it has essentially remained the same in the 1950-2050, while it MIGHT have been slightly improved in the past 3 years for remote periods, subject to Frank's confirmation.

The main picture and the Big one actually is that Frank's computer is "battle tested" as he put it once so rightly, and - as regards its reliability and accuracy - it is the only one I have found on the Internet which is certainly accurate to better than 0.07' throughout the 1750-2050 period for Ephemeris Computations. And as for taking in due account all significant corrections applicable to Lunars, I have checked its overall resulting accuracy to be always better than 0.1' there. As Frank also earlier explained, any further refinement would now require taking in account the apparent shape of the Moon Contour which becomes irregular at the accuracy of a few arc seconds because of the Moon Mountains. But WHO is going to observe Lunars with sextants to an accuracy better than 0.1 ' ?????

While I keep hoping that I did not write anything incorrect in the previous lines, I definitely leave to Frank to elaborate more on this if he so wishes.

Best Regards to you Aliex ... ***

Antoine

*** BTW the Russian language - which I took when I started Cosmonaut training many many Moons ago - is an absolutely beautiful language to my ears.
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