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A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
From: Sean C
Date: 2020 Oct 5, 00:48 -0700
James,
Nightshift is a handy Android app for astronomy. (I'm not sure if they make a version for iOS.) Attached are a couple of screenshots showing data for the moon. One shows a plot of the Moon's altitude through the night with indications of twilight and darkness. The vertical yellow line is the current time and the dashed parabola is the Moon's altitude. You can see that as I write this (I just took the screenshot), the Moon is very near culmination. The polygon under the altitude curve is a representation of the amount of cloud cover. The second screenshot shows the rise, set and transit times for the next four days.
But don't let me talk you out of making your own program. I am just about to finish tweaking a spreadsheet of my own design which includes an almanac, sight reduction tool and great circle route planner. It uses the formulas from Jean Meeus' book, Astronomical Algorithms, which a few people have mentioned already.
Also attached is a picture I took of the Moon a few months ago with my cheap Celestron Travel Scope and my cell phone. Not the best shot, but for a $100 scope, I think it's pretty good. I plan on getting a better telescope sometime in the near future.
Cheers, and happy observing!
Sean C.
