Archive
01/05/2015 – Ephemeris – Ephemeris’ dirty little secret
Ephemeris for Monday, January 5th. The sun will rise at 8:19. It’ll be up for 8 hours and 56 minutes, setting at 5:16. The moon, 1 day past full, will rise at 6:14 this evening.
With the bright moon, blocking all but the brightest stars, it’s a good time to do some housekeeping. When I started this program 39 ½ years ago IPR had only one transmitter and a single antenna pattern. The sunrise and sunset times worked well for that. However since then with transmitters from Manistee to the Straits I cannot hope to cover all that in a single program. The differences in the times vary with the seasons. To get help on the Internet go to my monthly site ephemeris.bjmoler.org and click on Calendars. There are calendars for Ludington, Cadillac, Interlochen/Traverse City, Petoskey and Mackinaw City. Select a month to view or printout a whole year. Use the email link to request a sunrise, sunset, and Moon calendar for your town.
Times are for the Traverse City/Interlochen area of Michigan. They may be different for your location.
Addendum
Click on Calendars in the header. and you will get this page.
This is the top of the Mackinaw City calendar where you can select to start at any month.
Partial image of the January calendar for Mackinaw City. The last column illum Fractn is the moon’s illuminated fraction. It is set for 24h UT, which is early evening on the date listed.
Interesting note: You can draw a straight line through Ludington, Interlochen/Traverse City, Petoskey and Mackinaw City. The angle with that line and the meridian is about 23 1/2 degrees. The same as the tilt of the Earth’s axis. Therefore near the winter solstice the sunrise times are nearly the same, but the sunset times can differ greatly. Conversely at the summer solstice the sunset times are nearly the same, but the sunrise times are the most divergent.
01/09/2012 – Ephemeris – Ephemeris on the Internet
Monday, January 9th. The sun will rise at 8:18. It’ll be up for 9 hours and 2 minutes, setting at 5:20. The moon, at full today, will rise at 6:09 this evening.
Although radio is a wonderful medium, it could help with a little visual assist from time to time. I have a website and a blog to help visualize the night sky and events. The website at ephemeris.bjmoler.org is updated monthly with that months sky events with illustrations and animations, while the Ephemeris Blog is updated daily at bobmoler.wordpress.com. By the way Moler is spelled simply M-O-L-E-R, no extra letters. Searching my name in Google will display these sites near the top. The blog has transcripts of the programs and best of all illustrations of the program topics, something I can’t do here. The nice thing about blogs is they are searchable by topic. I also have links to other sites if interest and free astronomical software.
* Times, as always are for the Traverse City/Interlochen area of Michigan.
Note:
These blog entries are scheduled to be released at 6 a.m. on the air date. The mp3s of the programs are available, generally a week at a time on the Ephemeris website.
Bob Moler's Ephemeris Blog 