AKICILJ: Programmable Calendar

[kiya]

In my ongoing goal of distracting myself from my catastrophic meltdown with painfully ludicrous levels of nerdery, I have been attempting to make sense of the Egyptian ritual calendar again. After acquiring sufficient beer to pad the landing, I am left wondering:

Does anyone know of software that can handle scheduling events in relationship to phases of the moon and other astronomical events? (In an ideal world, this would include the capacity to define and distinguish between twelve-lunar-month and thirteen-lunar-month years according to a ruleset.)

So, suggestions?

Comments

[solipsistnation.livejournal.com]

Sounds like a good reason to learn perl!

http://search.cpan.org/~brett/Astro-MoonPhase/MoonPhase.pm

...and in case it's helpful:

http://search.cpan.org/~jtrammell/Math-Fraction-Egyptian-0.01/lib/Math/Fraction/Egyptian.pm

[ardaniel]

I believe I have a lead on a way to do this in Python, but I'm not near Cortana right now. It won't be GUI or pretty, probably, either, much like mute's solutions.

(Learning a language for this is likely overkill, given your schedule and slate of concerns and the number of coders you already know who take bribes.)

[wcg.livejournal.com]

Moon Phase and Eclipse Schedules for your Microsoft Outlook® calendar

Moon Phase schedules show the exact time the phase will occur and even when the full moon is considered a “Blue Moon”. Eclipse schedules include the time the eclipse will begin, when it will reach its’ maximum, and the geographical location where it will be visible. We also include a brief description of the type of eclipse occurring.


The schedules are formatted for specific time zones. By supporting individual time zones, our information is more accurate than what is shown on a typical wall calendar. For example, a Full Moon occurring at 1:30 AM EST in New York would occur one day earlier at 10:30 PM PST in Los Angeles. Our schedules reflect this variance.

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

You can get moon phase info from the web, too. Or from the command line, or a number of other places...

[solipsistnation.livejournal.com]

Yes, but using something built into the language rather than "phoon | something" seemed a little less unweildy... 8)

[ardaniel]

Bleah, Python dev working on that hasn't actually finished his code for the Egyptian system. KDE has a project out there trying to make KCalendar think that way, but not for event scheduling, I don't think.

You might try looking around the public iCal sharing sites for astronomical calendars, importing those into your copy of iCal, and working backwards from there. Google Calendar has public calendars for moon phase and public sunrise/ sunset that you can load into iCal, for instance.

[pierceheart.livejournal.com]

Which definition of blue moon are they using?
Here's why I ask:
http://www.skyandtelescope.com/observing/objects/moon/3304131.html?showAll=y&c=y

I can't help with the original request, but I just wanted to note the blue moon issue, as i am the calendar keeper for my coven, and moon celebration (and thus knowing when it's full or dark) are part of my job, as is knowing the lore behind the names we give to each.

Oh, and on the link? People are CHARGING for that? Moon phases are available for free on google calendar.

[wcg.livejournal.com]

I don't know which definition they're using. Could be the wrong one. Though I doubt the concept of blue moon has anything to do with ancient Egyptian calendrical practices. It's a native American construct.

[kiya]

I was poking at iCal and Google calendar both a bit, and I can get the moon data in fine but I can't find anything that will let me do stuff based on it. Frustrating!

[kiya]

Man, I wish this was something that I could do with just keeping track of fulls and darks, because there are calendars for that, and even ordinary mundane paper calendars often have them marked.

But noooooo, I have to have a religion that wants "13 days after the full moon" or "the first dark moon after 137 days, 18 hours, 17 minutes, and 50 seconds after the vernal equinox."

[pierceheart.livejournal.com]

This reminds me of studying russian, with their transitive and intransitive verbs of motion, in university: we asked the professor "Did he go, by foot, there and back again, while wearing one red shoe, on a tuesday in june when it was raining?"

[kiya]

The sad thing is that "the first dark moon after 137 days, 18 hours, 17 minutes, and 50 seconds after the vernal equinox" is my simplified calculation...