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Recently a friend asked for a copy of a program that I wrote that produces
the monthly pages of the Nautical Almanac as they appeared about 200 years
ago. As it turned out, the easiest way to send the program was to put the
files on a web page so he could download them. Since they are already
posted, I thought I'd let the list know about them in the off chance that
someone else is interested.

Basically, the program creates a text file for a given month with all the
ephemera of the old almanacs. You can get the same thing from Frank Reed's
web-based almanac; this just gives you a monthly printout. When I first
wrote it I tested a bunch of random dates against Frank's almanac and they
agreed, but really, you would have to be completely insane to use
something like this for actual navigation, so the testing hasn't been very
rigorous. I wrote it just for the fun of calculating lunars by hand, much
as it was done ca. 1800, but using my own sights rather than historical
data.

You can find the executable program (Windows) as well as the source code
(written in Borland's Delphi (a Pascal derivative)) at:

http://www.ucalgary.ca/~kmuldrew/celestial/almanac.html

You can see a sample of the monthly pages at:

http://www.ucalgary.ca/~kmuldrew/celestial/almanac_11_06.PDF

and an old-style star chart (but using today's navigational stars) at:

http://www.ucalgary.ca/~kmuldrew/celestial/Star_Chart.pdf

I don't expect this will interest many people (if any!) but I'm happy to
answer any questions than anyone may have about the program.

Ken Muldrew.

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