NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
From: Frank Reed
Date: 2023 Nov 5, 19:04 -0800
Peter,
I have a guess...
I notice from your screen capture that you're using version 0.20.2 of Stellarium. That's only about three and a half years old according to the releases history here https://github.com/Stellarium/stellarium/releases/, but there have been many improvements since that time. Several years ago it was fairly easy to find inconsistencies, odd choices, and actual astronomical computation errors in Stellarium, but the app has been improved significantly since that time. Those pre-1.0 editions perhaps fairly deserved to be sub-versions of version "0". The latest published version of Stellarium, released last month, appears to be ver. 23.3. This version number does not imply what it might seem at first. The version numbering system jumped from 1.2 to 23.1 early in 2023 and the initial number now indicates the year of release.
I have tried to duplicate your data for Achernar. See the attached image. Notice I'm on version 1.2 which is a year old. I should update! Are these numbers more in line with what you expect to see?
Incidentally, Alexander Wolf, a coder/developer who lives in Siberia and who is one of the principal developers on the Stellarium team, occasionally posts NavList messages and may be able to explain better about the improvement in astronomical computation quality.
Frank Reed
Clockwork Mapping / ReedNavigation.com
Conanicut Island USA