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Clear Sky Chart    Collimation    Lunar Ephemeris    Sunrise/Moonrise Data  

Find the coordinates of your observing site with TOPOZONE.COM.

Synchronize your GOTO scope's computer with the atomic clock.  Click on this link and then click on the "Java Display" link.

 


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Sunrise, Sunset, Moonrise, and Moonset - U.S. Cities or Towns
Courtesy of The United States Naval Observatory

Year:   Month:   Day:

State or Territory:

City or Town Name:

The place name you enter above must be a city or town in the U.S. The place's location will be retrieved from a file with over 22,000 places listed. Either upper- or lower-case letters or a combination can be used. Spell out place name prefixes, as in "East Orange", "Fort Lauderdale", "Mount Vernon", etc. The only exception is "St.", which is entered as an abbreviation with a period, as in "St. Louis". You need only enter as many characters as will unambiguously identify the place.

 

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Download this Lunar Colongitude calculating program. Save it to your desktop.

 

Lunar Ephemeris
Ephemeris - (def.) a table giving the computed positions of a celestial body for every day of a given period.
Important ephemeris calculations include Libration - (def. a slight rocking motion of the moon which allows 59% of the moon's surface to be visible from the earth), and colongitude (The lunar longitude of the morning terminator i.e. the longitude on the moon of the lunar sunrise.).  Libration is given as the longitude and latitude of the apparent center of the moon's disk.  Colongitide is used to determine where the sun is at a low angle giving long shadows which enhance features on the moon.  The evening terminator is the colongitude plus or minus 180 degrees.

Download a neat little lunar ephemeris program in a few minutes that you can use on your own computer. Download.

Or you can use this form.

Approximate Moon physical ephemeris in Javascript
Type in the UT date and time
Universal Time (UT) is Central Daylight Time (CDT) + 5 hours or Central Standard Time (CST) + 6 hours.  For example: January 25, 1999, 21:15 CST would be January 26, 1999, 3:15 UT.

Date format: The date 21 February 2000 at 23:50 CST would be 22 February 2000 at 5:50 UT and is entered as 20000222.0550
.
Enter **UT** (Universal Date.Time) date and time in yyyymmdd.hhmm format:

Results: Physical Ephemeris of Moon
Selenographic (lunar) longitudes towards Mare Crisium are taken as positive. All figures here are based on geocentric coordinates, and position angles relate to the North Celestial Pole.
Libration in Latitude (B):
Libration in Longitude (L):
Colongitude of the Sun (Co):
Subsolar point Lat (Bo):
Subsolar point Long (Lo):
Selenographic Longitude of terminator:
Illuminated fraction of Moon's disc:
Position angle of bright limb:
Position angle of polar axis:
Results: Time
Days since J2000.0:
Julian Day Number:
Results: Sun's position
Distance (AU):
Right Ascension:
Declination:
Results: Moon's position
Distance (Earth radii):
Right Ascension:
Declination:

This page copied with revisions from http://www.stargazing.net/kepler/jsmoon.html
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Collimation

Collimation is a process of aligning the mirrors in a telescope so that the image can be focused as well as possible.  This is a site that offers collimation tools for classical cassegrain and Newtonian reflector telescopes.

Amateurastronomy.com Tools

 

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