Esquire Nautical Almanac
By Debabrat Mishra
I am a navigator . Been curious how the nautical almanac is made , with the help of internet sites and valuable books by Jean Meeus and Paul J Hefner , I got to know the formulas used for making an almanac. I should say the freeware "Esquire" is an program for nautical almanac but not the substitute for it . VSOP 87 theory has been used for the calculation . This gives very accurate results . For stars the effect of aberration and precession and nutation applied. The epoch used is Epoch 2000. In my calculation the periodic terms used are not limited to those given in Mr. Meeus book but the very elaborate (around 25000, for all the objects) obtained from various sources . Pluto is not added in this version as it is not required for navigation but anyway will be added in the next version along with eclipses , different type of sailings and various methods of position fixing .Your comments (snide included) and suggestions are welcome .Screen shot is placed below. U can down load the freeware from the link posted below. I am thankful to Prohosting.com for providing the space .This project dedicated to my six month old daughter . I am thankful to my father who taught me mathematics and my wife for her constant encouragement . My email address : mdebabrat@hotmail.com
The new version of Esquire has the solar and lunar Eclipse dates . The other new feature of this version is GPS interface . Connect the GPS with the computer with serial port connector . With a 9 pin connector connect the GPS Data out put to Pin No 2 and GPS Ground to Pin No5. COM port is set to 1. The network interface may be ignored as that is custom made for my personal use .The animated moon will be placed in your sys-tray when the program is running. There might be some bug if u encounter pl. let me know. The file "Esquirenew.zip" contain full set of files and all dependant files required for the program . This is around 6.5MB.Hope this will be useful to numerous amateur astronomers and navigators as this can be online almanac .Please note if not connected to GPS user can select the "No interface" button for normal operation.
http://storm.prohosting.com/butu1987/esquire.zip
Reference:
Astronomical Algorithms(2nd edition) by Jean Meeus
Explanatory supplement to astronomical almanac
Fundamental Ephemeris Computation by Paul J Heafner