A Handy Tool for Calculating the Position and Orientation of the Moon

After a couple weeks of work, I have completed an implementation of "Lunar Tables and Programs" published in 1991 by Michelle Chapront-Touzé and Jean Chapront of France. I then took the position of the moon relative to the center of the earth (calculated using their method from the tables) and went further with it by converting into topocentric coordinates for a given location and also included functions to compensate for atmospheric refraction, calculate the phase angle and calculate the orientation relative to the local horizon. The output is all numerical as opposed to the visual output of programs like Stellarium, and unlike stellarium you can see the formulas all right there in front of you.

You can get the spreadsheet here:
www.filedropper.com...

Tagging on here to read this later sounds useful!

Patched version 1:
www.filedropper.com...
There was a bug with quadrant disambiguation in the azimuth that could cause erroneous values for azimuth in some cases.

reply to post by ngchunter


I was told that the file didn't work when downloaded from that link, so here's an alternative link (also fixed another disambiguation bug):
dropcanvas.com...

Here's a new version which includes precession to J2000.0, which is standard for most programs and telescopes:



dropcanvas.com...