NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
To Those Who Asked for TI-81 or 82 Sun Programs
From: Bill Murdoch
Date: 1997 Feb 22, 09:31 EST
From: Bill Murdoch
Date: 1997 Feb 22, 09:31 EST
From: W. S. Murdoch, Polymers D&C (Kpt. 1027) Subject: To Those Who Asked for TI-81 or 82 Sun Programs I think I have mailed to everyone who asked for them copies of the text that I submitted to Cruising World for the March 1996 article "A Sun Sight Reduction Program for the TI-81 Calculator" and the booklet I have written "Sun Sight Reduction with the TI-82 Calculator". I was a little slow. I had to go to Kinkos and have a few more run off. If you don't get them in a week or two, please ask again. I may have skipped over you. My e-mail is here at work and to save some time (this is not what I am paid to do) let me answer most of the questions that I was asked in this note rather than replying individually. The references for the mathematical methods for computing the GHA, declination and semidiameter of the sun are at the end of both the article and the booklet. I don't have code for any of the PC languages or for spreadsheets. It should not be hard to convert the TI-81 or TI-82 code that is in either the article or the booklet. The TI code looks like Basic. The TI-81 does not have enough memory to do much more than the sun alone (and still keep the good input and output formatting). However, if you look closely you can see that the GHA Aries is calculated as part of calculating the GHA sun. It would be possible to rewrite the program so that you could reduce star sights by entering the SHA and declination of the star. These do not change too rapidly, but they would have to be updated annually or so. To make room, something would have to be removed from the sun program, but life is a set of choices. The moon or planets require more memory than the TI-81 can provide. The TI-82 has plenty of memory and is capable of much more than just sun sight reductions to intercept and azimuth. A couple of years ago I wrote a much longer TI-82 program that includes almanacs for the sun, moon, four planets, and 93 stars. It reduces single sights to intercepts and azimuths and multiple sights to a lat/long fix. It calculates times of sunrise and sunset, handles great circle and Mercator sailings, displays ephemeris data in both Nautical Almanac and Astronomical Almanac formats, identifies unknown bodies, gives the data to set up a 2010D starfinder, displays the altitude and azimuth of every body in its internal almanac, etc. The program fills the 28k calculator memory. I wrote a small book (180 typewritten pages) listing the program, providing test data and examples, and describing how it works. I have not been able to find a publisher for it, but have been selling manuscript copies for $25 by word of mouth and a classified ad in Ocean Navigator. Bill Murdoch