
NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Re: Silicon Sea
From: Alexandre Eremenko
Date: 2006 May 21, 07:47 -0400
From: Alexandre Eremenko
Date: 2006 May 21, 07:47 -0400
Robert, The reason why I wanted to have an almanac for "all past and future years" on my computer was simple: then I could make a simple program which will reduce all types of sights with minimal input data. Like Frank's Lunar calculator. Currently I have a program for sight reduction which requires input from a paper almanac or from a web-based almanac. Alex On Sun, 21 May 2006, Robert Gainer wrote: > > For our purpose I think it would be better to make copies of the relevant pages from the Nautical Almanac. The end use is to provide a lookup table to solve workbook problems. So part of the learning experience it to find the data in the actual pages. Does Mystic keep old Almanacs? Who might have out of date books like this? > Thanks, > Robert Gainer > > > > > From: Alexandre E Eremenko> > Date: 2006/05/21 Sun AM 05:46:24 EDT > > To: NAVIGATION-L@LISTSERV.WEBKAHUNA.COM > > Subject: Re: Silicon Sea > > > > > As far as I know, everyone uses the algorithms described by Jean Meeus. I > > > seem to remember that at least one list contributor calculates data as > > > needed directly, for virtually any date in the past or future. > > > > I remember an old discussion on the Nav-L list on the best method > > of generating an almanac. Using Meeus seems (to me) very hard and time > > consuming > > (his formulas contain many terms and one has to input a lot of > > numerical coefficients). As I remember, Frank proposed a simpler > > solution: downolading all ready data from some site on the web. > > This was a large file. Frank never said however how his own almanac > > works, whether it uses pre-computed data, or computes each time > > by Meeus's or similar formulas. > > > > Alex. > > >