On Thu, 10 May 2012 10:55:37 +0100
Thomas Morris <[email protected]>
wrote:

> I share Georg's feeling on this. The Swiss Ephemeris website seems to
> be targeted towards an astrological audience rather than an
> astronomical one.

Have you, at least, tried to read these few paragraphs:

The Swiss Ephemeris is based upon the latest planetary and lunar
ephemeris, DE405/406, developed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The
original integration, DE405, covered the years 3000 BC to 3000 AD and
required 550 Mb of disk space. DE406 is a compressed version of DE405
which requires 200 MB while maintaining a precision of better than 1 m
for the moon and 25 m for the planets. These data have been further
compressed with sophisticated compression techniques developed by
Astrodienst. The ephemeris now requires for the complete 6000 years only
5 Mb for all planets except the Moon, and 13 Mb for the Moon. This
compressed ephemeris reproduces the JPL data with 0.001 arcseconds
precision.  

We have extended the timespan of the JPL ephemeris by numerical
integration, so that Swiss Ephemeris covers the years 5400 BC to 5400
AD, a total of 10'800 years. For this extended timespan the ephemeris
requires 32 Mbytes of ephemeris files.  

All transformation steps from the inertial timeframe of the JPL DE406
integration to the reference frame for astrological coordinates (true
equinox of date), all corrections like relativistic aberration,
deflection of light in the gravity field of the Sun etc. have been
performed with utmost care and precision so that the target precision of
0.001 arcsec is maintained through all transformation steps. Never
before has such a high precision ephemeris been available to
astrologers.  

Swiss Ephemeris contains three ephemerides. The user can choose whether
he/she wants to use the original JPL DE406 data (if available at his/her
site), the compressed Swiss Ephemeris data (the default) or a built in
semianalytic theory by Steve Moshier. The Swiss Ephemeris package
switches automatically to the available best precision ephemeris
dependent on which installed ephemeris files it finds. Even without any
stored ephemeris files, using the Moshier model, planetary positions
with better than 0.1 seconds of arc precision are available (3 arcsec
for the Moon).


or it is just prejudice considering that astronomy & astrology does not
have anything in common?


Sincerely,
Gour

-- 
As a strong wind sweeps away a boat on the water, 
even one of the roaming senses on which the mind 
focuses can carry away a man's intelligence.

http://atmarama.net | Hlapicina (Croatia) | GPG: 52B5C810

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