NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Re: Hi (WAS: Re: ping)
From: Hal Mueller
Date: 2001 Jan 25, 7:52 PM
From: Hal Mueller
Date: 2001 Jan 25, 7:52 PM
At 4:18 PM -0800 1/25/01, Yves Arrouye wrote: >So I'm now looking for 1/ good references to >algorithms (Jean Meeus?), and 2/ suggestions on what you would like to see >in a celestial navigation program that existing programs do not have. When I was developing CelestNav and MG229, I used Jean Meeus "Astronomical Algorithms" for the planetary ephemeris, the Nautical Almanac itself for most of the sight reduction algorithms (with some help from the hardcopy HO229), Bowditch for the geodesy formulas, and the program MICA (from the US Naval Observatory) for checking ephemeris calculations. Most of those references can be purchased from Willman-Bell. Early versions of CelestNav used the PD code NOVAS (also from the USNO) to do the star ephemeris, but most of that code is gone now. The most-requested feature enhancements from CelestNav customers are support for artificial horizons, and sight planning tools (predict the azi/elev of visible bodies from your DR position). In addition to my own apps (CelestNav and MG229), I'm aware of Astronavigation 2, and Pilot Navigator 3.1. All 4 are available at http://www.palmgear.com/software/answer.cfm?categoryIDs=126%2C. On the Palm side, if you decide to code in C I suggest you get up to speed on multisegment applications, as well as learning the launch codes and user interface guidelines thoroughly. There are other options besides C now: AppForge's port of Visual Basic, NSBasic, Satellite Forms, CASL, and others I've skipped. They're all listed on www.palmos.com/dev. The Palm OS Emulator is an essential tool. If you are outside of the US, sign up right now for the developer program so that you can have access to the device ROMs (there's an annoying delay between signup and access). Start your Gremlins testing on POSE right away; don't wait until your code is finished. Regards, Hal ---- Hal Mueller hal@mobilegeographics.com Mobile Geographics LLC http://www.mobilegeographics.com/ Seattle, Washington (206) 297-9575