[X] My Assistant

[Pertinax]

I'm looking for some help from all the great minds here at UMSF. I have what I though would be an easy problem to solve via Google: find an application (ideally free but that is not essential) that will provide for a given lat and lon a table of moon positions (alt and az) and phase for a given time interval. I would even settle for just the azimuth of each day's moon rise and set.

So far and much to my chagrin, my search has been fruitless.

Any thoughts?


-- Pertinax




(Sorry for the new topic here -- I couldn't find a better spot.)

[CosmicRocker]

This isn't exactly what you asked for, but it is free and will provide the information you are after. Home Planet 3 is a free planetarium application available at this interesting and rather eclectic web site. Here is a direct link to Home Planet itself. It will not provide a table of information over a time interval, but it will provide that information for any instant of time. You would have to enter your location on earth and specify a date and time. Date and time are easily editable, and can even be animated. Then, the menu item Display-Sun/Moon Information will give a table of lunar information containing phase and other statistics. To get the Altitude and Azimuth, or Right ascension and Declination you will need to display a second table available as the menu item Display-Planetary Positions. I hope you find something better, but if not...

[Pertinax]

Thank you to you both.

Geert: I'm flirting with the Excel route as I don't need tremendous accuracy -- I'm just trying to note all the days this year when the moon will be visible in our webcam's view.

CR: Oddly enough your sugestion is my plan B, save that I would be using Stelarium.


Cheers, and thank you to you both!


-- Pertinax

[Pertinax]

testing firefox script block settings

[Thu]

Pertinax, you can also try JPL's HORIZONS system http://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/horizons.cgi

Choose web-interface then select Target Body (Moon [Luna] 301), Observer Location (your location), Time Span (where you can define time interval also), Table Settings (specify the data you need here) and finally click on Generate Ephemeris.

If you want to import the generated data into an Excel spreadsheet, just change Display/Output setting to download/save instead of the default HTML and use Excel to open the downloaded file.

Good luck!
Thu