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In the dark recesses of google books, there are a number of copies of
Nautical Almanacs from the late 18th century and the first half of the
19th century. So far I have found complete copies of these years:
1793, 1797, 1798, 1801 (already had these thanks to that "free trial"
thing last spring), and 1818/1819, 1828, 1829, 1830, 1831, 1835, 1836,
1837, 1839, 1847, 1850. There are probably more. Note that 1818 and
1819 are combined in one pdf file probably because they were bound
together, which seems to have been popular around this time period.
These books were somewhat hard to find using the search engine for
google books. I think their digitization project may have jumped well
ahead of their search indexing capabilities. If you want to try
finding these yourself, try googling various combinations of the words
in the full title: The Nautical Almanac and Astronomical Ephemeris,
with and without date limits. Please let me know if you locate any
other years.

For those on the list who haven't explored old editions of the
Nautical Almanac, collecting old almanacs might sound like a waste of
time; after all, modern software can tell us where the Moon was in
1818 much more accurately and easily than a contemporary almanac. But
the prefaces and especially the appendixes back then contained
interesting descriptive and explanatory information, as well as
complete articles on various astronomical and navigational topics.

Note that there is also a digitized copy of one early 19th century
Nautical Almanac on the Mystic Seaport Library web site at
schooner.mysticseaport.org. Because they are right now in the process
of  moving the library's collection across the street (to the
Collections Research Center which some of you visited with us back in
June), the library's services, including their web presence, have been
offline occasionally.

And finally, if you want to compare old almanac data with calculations
based on modern ephemeris data, just a reminder that there is a
complete online Nautical Almanac covering the period from 1750 through
the present on my web site at www.HistoricalAtlas.com/lunars .

-FER
Mac OSX edition of Centennia Historical Atlas almost done! (so I
should be back to active posting next week...)


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