NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Re: Almanac Heaven
From: Frank Reed CT
Date: 2006 Mar 30, 02:45 EST
From: Frank Reed CT
Date: 2006 Mar 30, 02:45 EST
Ken Gebhart wrote: "Also, Brown's Almanac (Glascow), and Reed's Almanac, are claimed by the British Almanac Office to be paying royalties too. " And really, it is in their best interests financially to do so. The astronomical and navigational data themselves cannot be copyrighted. No one owns the position of Mars at 0h GMT on June 23, 2013. No one owns the value of the atmospheric refraction at four degrees altitude. I can easily publish today my own "Nautical Almanac" calculated from first principles (and the standard JPL ephemeris data) and it would be functionally identical to the official Nautical Almanac. But who would buy it (especially since I make that data available for free on my web site)? Part of the reason that navigators and navigation enthusiasts are willing to buy private almanacs today is because of the implicit promise that there are no errors since they derive from the "official" source. A re-publisher is spending money wisely to get data sanctioned with a "seal of approval" from those official sources. It creates instant credibility. And of course, there is no way that *they* could publish any mistakes. By the way, didn't someone inform the list a while back that Reed's Almanac (no relation, incidentally) no longer includes celestial navigation tables? -FER 42.0N 87.7W, or 41.4N 72.1W. www.HistoricalAtlas.com/lunars
