is has now been posted on www.solar-noon.com

There are two areas where further improvement may be possible, and I
would welcome the views of others.

1. We have used the average values as in Waugh (and repeated in many
other places).  (You can get a printout of these values by setting the
longitude to zero.)   Average values are good enough for the Spot-
On Sundial, for which this calculator was designed, and have the practical 
advantage that the table can be kept next to the sundial without reprinting 
it each year.  But it would be better to provide more accurate values if this 
can be done without too much additional complication.    

Question: would it be useful to the wider sundial community to have a
facility for calculations on the actual values for this year?  Would it
be useful to anybody to have the whole year's figures on one sheet for
just this one year (and have to print out another one next year).  

2. If we do use an average, are the Waugh figures the best ones to use.
We had previously checked them against the arithmetic average of the
NASS Diallist results for the first of each month over the 4-year cycle,
and there are differences ranging from 2 to 20 seconds.  I am no
astronomer, and so really do not know what can or should be done about
this.  

Question: Can anyone suggest a better set of averages, or way of
calculating them?   

Comments gratefully received, and again many thanks for all the comments on 
the original posting.  

Piers Nicholson 

Reply via email to