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Frank's note prompts a question in my mind and one which I have posed before. 
Perhaps Ken, as a retailer for the commercial version of the NA can shed some 
light on this too:

For how much longer will the US Government publish the Nautical Almanac? With 
GPS pretty much having eclipsed, if not eradicated celestial, will we 
eventually reach a point where the Nautical Almanac will no longer be 
available as a printed document - commercial or government-produced --  but 
as a computer program with printable tables? I sure hope not but it seems to 
me that the world is fast going paperless and electronic.

For that matter, will there still be a practical requirement for observatories 
to collect and calculate astronomical ephemeris data. Certainly these data 
will likely be maintained for astronomers but what about for the mariner, who 
requires a slightly different version?

Robert



----- Original Message -----
From: Frank Reed 
Date: Thursday, March 30, 2006 2:45 am
Subject: Re: Almanac Heaven

> 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
> officialNautical 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
> navigationenthusiasts 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
>

   

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