MoonLock Saturn

PLEASE NOTE: MoonLock has been superseded/replaced by TIDELOCK.

MoonLock Saturn is a realistic simulator designed to provide accurate measurements of the position of Saturn, its rings and some of its primary moons, for the physical observation of the system. Although MoonLock Saturn is not meant to be as accurate as NASA’s JPL ephemerides, it is sufficiently accurate to be trusty and reliable if you wish to use your telescope and predict the position of the moons and rings.

"Sufficiently Accurate" is a direct reference to Jean Meeus. This program was written as an implementation of Astronomical Algorithms, originally developed by Jean Meeus: his incredible work in the field of Computational Astronomy has been the inspiration for many works, including this one...

MoonLock Saturn is a companion to MoonLock Jupiter (the latter performing similar functions on the Galilean system). These are the functions that MoonLock Saturn can perform:

* Detailed ephemeris of Saturn, its rings and its moons, for a given date and time, including observer's coordinates and time location

* Realistic visualization/Simulation of the system as one would see in real time

* Real-time calculations for any given instant (from the years 2000 to 2050)

* Realistic mechanical visualization of the Satellite System

* Calculations performed on-the-fly (no interaction with outside apps or systems)

* Ability to move time forward and backward and to zoom in and out of calculations and orbits

* "Sufficiently Accurate" results are good to 1 hour within your location

To use MoonLock you must first establish your location profile (otherwise, all calculations default to midnight - Greenwich) - this is called your "observatory". You may look up your city's coordinated easily by searching google (for instance, "Washington DC coordinates" and simply enter the location angles provided in decimal form (e.g. 53.2366). Also check the box for Daylight Savings Time and enter your time offset from GMT (for instance, in the eastern US this would be 5 hours - no sign needed for positive offsets, use negative sign for negative offsets). You may use the DST button to automatically calculate and prefill this.

After you have done the above, simply click on any of the available functions (Ephemeris or Visualization) and all should be set.