OSXmoontool 0.2

the Mac OS X-Port
of
John Walkers moontool

Designed and implemented by John Walker in December 1987, Revised and updated in February of 1988. Revised and updated again in June of 1988 by Ron Hitchens. Revised and updated yet again in July/August of 1989 by Ron Hitchens. Converted to OpenWindows in December of 1991 by John Walker.

This program is an OpenWindows tool which displays, as the icon for a closed window, the current phase of the Moon. A subtitle in the icon gives the age of the Moon in days and hours. If called with the "-t" switch, it rapidly increments forward through time to display the cycle of phases.

If you open the window, additional information is displayed regarding the Moon. The information is generally accurate to within ten minutes.

The algorithms used in this program to calculate the positions Sun and Moon as seen from the Earth are given in the book "Practical Astronomy With Your Calculator" by Peter Duffett-Smith, Second Edition, Cambridge University Press, 1981. Ignore the word "Calculator" in the title; this is an essential reference if you're interested in developing software which calculates planetary positions, orbits, eclipses, and the like. If you're interested in pursuing such programming, you should also obtain:

"Astronomical Formulae for Calculators" by Jean Meeus, Third Edition, Willmann-Bell, 1985. A must-have.

"Planetary Programs and Tables from -4000 to +2800" by Pierre Bretagnon and Jean-Louis Simon, Willmann-Bell, 1986. If you want the utmost (outside of JPL) accuracy for the planets, it's here.

"Celestial BASIC" by Eric Burgess, Revised Edition, Sybex, 1985. Very cookbook oriented, and many of the algorithms are hard to dig out of the turgid BASIC code, but you'll probably want it anyway.

Many of these references can be obtained from Willmann-Bell, P.O. Box 35025, Richmond, VA 23235, USA. Phone: (804) 320-7016. In addition to their own publications, they stock most of the standard references for mathematical and positional astronomy.

This program was written by:

This program is in the public domain: "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law". I'd appreciate receiving any bug fixes and/or enhancements, which I'll incorporate in future versions of the program. Please leave the original attribution information intact so that credit and blame may be properly apportioned.

History:

June 1988 Version 2.0 posted to usenet by John Walker

June 1988 Modified by Ron Hitchens

to produce version 2.1. Modified icon generation to show surface texture on visible moon face. Added a menu to allow switching in and out of test mode, for entertainment value mostly. Modified layout of information in open window display to reduce the amount of pixels modified in each update.

July 1989 Modified further for color displays.

On a color Sun, four colors will be used for the canvas and the icon. Rather than just show the illuminated portion of the moon, a color icon will also show the darkened portion in a dark blue shade. The text on the icon will also be drawn in a nice "buff" color, since there was one more color left to use. Add two command line args, "-c" and "-m" to explicitly specify color or monochrome mode. Use getopt to parse the args. Change the tool menu slightly to use only one item for switching in and out of test mode.

July 1989 Modified

a little bit more a few days later to use 8 colors and an accurate grey-scale moon face created by Joe Hitchens on an Amiga. Added The Apollo 11 Commemorative Red Dot, to show where Neil and Buzz went on vacation a few years ago. Updated man page.

August 1989 Received version 2.3 of John Walker's original code.

Rolled in bug fixes to astronomical algorithms:
2.1 6/16/88 Bug fix. Table of phases didn't update at the moment of the new moon. Call on phasehunt didn't convert civil Julian date to astronomical Julian date. Reported by Dag Bruck (dag@control.lth.se).
2.2 N/A (Superseded by new moon icon.)
2.3 6/7/89 Bug fix. Table of phases skipped the phases for July 1989. This occurred due to sloppy maintenance of the synodic month index in the interchange of information between phasehunt() and meanphase(). I simplified and corrected the handling of the month index as phasehunt() steps along and removed unneeded code from meanphase(). Reported by Bill Randle of Tektronix. (billr@saab.CNA.TEK.COM).

January 1990 Ported to OpenWindows by John Walker.

All of Ron Hitchens' additions which were not Sun-specific were carried on into the OpenWindows version.

December 1999 Minor Y2K fix. Release 3.1.

August 2005 Mac-Version 0.1

Porting to Mac OS X / Carbon by Thomas Siemion (OSXmoontool@siemion.de)

You'll find the home-page of this programme at:
http://www.siemion.de/programme/OSXmoontool/

April 2006 Mac-Version 0.2