We had a 27-line Basic program for Easter, based on Butcher's method, in Sky & Telescope for March 1986, pages 294-295. It is available for free download from: http://www.skyandtelescope.com/resources/software/3304911.html?page=3&c=y (Scroll down that page to "EASTER.BAS")
The original trio of short articles in our March 1986 issue also gives an even shorter program, written by me in Forth! And Gauss's method is listed as well. One of those articles discusses the procedure described in the Episcopal Church's Book of Common Prayer, 1928 edition, where Easter is calculated by means of the Golden Number. The time zone (Rome or anywhere else) doesn't enter into the calculation at all. The ecclesiastical rules for Easter do not rely on the astronomical phase of the Moon to determine the paschal full Moon on which Easter is based. Instead, the ecclesiastical rules unambiguously lead to a particular Sunday in any given year, and Easter is to be observed on that Sunday, local time. -- Roger ________________________________________ From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of JC White - Casa del Potro [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Wednesday, March 19, 2008 12:50 AM To: [email protected] Subject: easter For an intriguing algorithm for calculating the date of easter, as proposed by the great German mathematician Gauss, see Fortran Programming by Robert V Jameson, McGraw-Hill, 1966, LCC number 65-27979 32271, page 150. This is the algorithm I used in my Basic language program... I will include the page with the copy of the Basic program to those who requested that program from me off list... John --------------------------------------------------- https://lists.uni-koeln.de/mailman/listinfo/sundial
