NavList:

Dave Walden sent me an email noticing that the PDF which Greg Rudzinski posted earlier today was the complete text of "Astronomical Algorithms" by Jean Meeus, with the copyright by the US publisher "Willman-Bell". Willman-Bell is a specialty publishing house which has released various small print-run astronomy books over the years. I don't think there's much in the book that can actually be claimed under US copyright law: equations for calculating the Sun's position cannot be protected by copyright, nor can text defining sidereal time and similar basic, technical terms, and the "presentation" is trivial --nothing that would stand a copyright challenge in the US. So I'm not too worried about it, and I doubt that Jean Meeus would be either. The scan itself is a curiosity: apparently produced from a spiral-bound edition, which was itself a bootleg copy, held by a library at Ljubljana University in Slovenia. But I should say here that if a representative of Willman-Bell asks me to remove this PDF at some point in the future, I will.

Also, just a reminder that we should all be respectful of works protected by copyright. Just because a book is a bit old and dusty, by some standard, does not mean that it is out of copyright. It's not for us to decide. So, as an example, though it might be tempting, a copy of Mixter's "Primer of Navigation" published in the 1940s is still protected by copyright law for a few more years and should not be posted online. Exceptions apply to US Government publications, like Bowditch (all editions), anything older than 75 years, and anything that is pure data and/or science. If someone publishes a great textbook explaining how celestial navigation works, and how to do it, that's protected by copyright 100%. But if someone publishes a new table of solutions of the navigational triangle, that is not protected (in the US, which is the law covering NavList activities).

-FER