NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
From: Frank Reed
Date: 2025 Dec 9, 19:15 -0800
I finally got around to checking out the details on that Nov 16 lunar case that Paul Hirose posted. I had speculated previously that the issue might be a result of this case being a "short lunar". While it is very often true that short lunars have non-inear interpolation problems which can make life difficult depending on how the cleared distance is interpolated between predicted distances, it turns out that this case with the star Spica was very linear despite the short distance. So the large error cannot be explained on that basis. My guess was wrong.
It looks like Luis Soltero retired from this project five or more years ago (support links and sales links now all forward from StarPilotLLC to StarPath), so it could easily be the case that the astronomical data for the Moon in his old app has "aged out" at least in some versions. Does anyone actually own this app anymore? It was available originally on TI-89 calculators, then on Windows, and then as an iPhone app, but those latter apps were apparently direct ports of the calculator version.
Frank Reed






