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Old 18-08-2005, 08:00 PM
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mojo (Terry)
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Join Date: Sep 2004
Location: Melbourne
Posts: 1,665
My my. For people that didn't even realise the moon was mirrored, you sure are pedantic about the next full moon.

Ok. Here's the story with the moon phase. The rise and set times are very accurate; to within +/- 1 minute. Basically rounding errors. The moon phase, on the other hand, is not exactly right.

For instance, the next full moon is shown as 19 August (it doesn't show it, but it's at 11:42pm). The list shows it as the 20th because each phase is taken from midnight of that day, so it's just rounded up and shown it to be a full moon on that day.

The actual and correct full moon is 4 hours later on the 20th at 3:54am.

The reason for this, is that the current moon phase calculation is an aproximation without solving for Kepler's equation. I was too lazy to actually code the formula, so I used an aproximation based on the date of a full moon in 2001.

So for the people looking for hair on their palms, don't fret. I'll rewrite the moon phase to display the exact phase to within +/- 1 minute. And you'll know exactly when the next full moon will be.

Thus endeth the moonphase lesson...
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