NIGHTTIME ASTRONOMICAL CALENDAR
By John Thorstensen, Dartmouth College
with a Web interface by Brian Casey.

NOTE....These pages are super old. The notes below did indeed come with the skycalc program. However a new version written entirely in Java is now available. Check out John Thorsten's home page.

This web page uses a slightly older version of skycalendar; the changes since have been minor. The most recent version is available, packaged with skycalc, via anonymous ftp . The following are the notes from the program.

This calendar is designed to provide information useful for the planning of nighttime observations. The format should minimize confusion; each line gives the phenomena for a single (local!) night, and each line is labeled with both evening and morning (local) day and date. Note that all times given are LOCAL CIVIL (zone) times.

The rise/set times printed are the times at which the center of the object is 50 arcminutes below the geometrical horizon. At the given twilight, the center of the sun is 18.0 degrees below the geometrical horizon.

The moon positions (and rise/set times) are generated by an implementation of the Low-Precision formulae in the Astronomical Almanac. The Almanac states that the error seldom exceeds 0.3 degrees. Topocentric corrections are included. Comparisons with tables for Kitt Peak in the NOAO Newsletter indicate that the rise-set times are good to +- 2 min or so. The moon's RA, Dec, and illuminated fraction are given for local midnight, regardless of whether the moon is actually up at that time. Note that the moonrise and moonset times are not printed if they occur near mid-day.

The LST at evening and morning twilight are tabulated. This gives an accurate idea of the range of RA's accessible during the night.

The JD is given (severely rounded off) for local midnight. Again, this avoids any ambiguity.

Credits:

The sidereal time and Julian date routines were originally coded in PL/I by Steve Maker of Dartmouth College. The algorithms originated in the old American Ephemeris . The routine to convert JD back to calendar date is adapted from Numerical Recipes in C , by Press et al.

Cautions:

I believe that the program which generates these tables is reasonably accurate. However, it has not been exhaustively tested, so you should be sure to run 'sanity checks' on the results. Also, in view of the approximations used, the results should not be used when high precision is needed. Extension to dates far from the present (1990) should be done with great caution. The code has not been tested for the eastern or southern hemishpheres. Rise/set times are slightly incaccurate and rather confusing at circumpolar latitudes, where the concept of a 'night' is blurry.

The daylight savings time conventions (if used) are quite specific (to U. S., post-1986) and subject to change. I know that the code has many infelicities; if you should find actual errors,please notify John.Thorstensen@dartmouth.edu

This output comes from a (hopefully) portable, completely self-contained program in the c language. It is available from the author and may be used freely for scientific or educational purposes. If you use it for profit, please contact the author to arrange a (modest!) fee. Source code is copyright John Thorstensen, 1990.

Web version

Brian Casey has written the web wrapper around skycalc for some specific calculations. I (BC) make no guarantees that the web form is bug free. Please let me know of any problems at bccomment@briancasey.org.