Although I only briefly mentioned it in this post, this past summer I’d taken the quadrant to Queen’s Prize which is Calontir’s novice level A&S competition held once during each reign. One of the challenges I faced was that the quadrant didn’t entirely fit in any of the categories. While it was designed to function like a period instrument, it was built using decidedly modern methods, and the goal of the quadrant wasn’t the instrument itself, but the measurements it could take. So the overall reaction from the judges was “super cool, but it’s hard to judge on its own merits.”
Thus, it was suggested that a more appropriate format for me might be a research paper. As the measurements from the quadrant is still a project in process, I knew I would need to do a paper on something else. While I was sorely tempted to simply print out all of my Almagest posts as one massive paper, I was inspired when writing this post on applications of the rising time tables. In particular, a member of my Barony, Padraigin, is interested in medieval astrology which makes use of rising signs; something that Ptolemy describes how to calculate. However, based on the work done thus far, it was only simple to do for latitudes given in the rising time tables. My goal was to try to condense the methodology for computing a rising time table at any latitude into a relatively short paper.
Continue reading “Queen’s Prize Winter 2019 – Computing Astronomical Rising Signs for Any Latitude & Excel Calculator”
