Gustav Brock
gustav at cactus.dk
Sun Oct 19 04:04:43 CDT 2003
Hi Stuart Great links, thank you. Also note this page which has a lot of explanation to many calendaring questions: http://www.tondering.dk/claus/cal/calendar26.html /gustav > On 18 Oct 2003 at 19:24, Henry Simpson wrote: >> Agreed. I can see no justifiable reason for the arbitrary cut off of >> negative date values below: >> >> ?cdate(-657434) >> >> How did they choose that magic number when the range of potential numbers >> for a double range down to over 300 digits and not just part way through 6. >> >> Those who face the need to catalog Egyptian artifacts would probably resort >> to string representations of dates even though they might want to estimate >> life spans of pharoahs and calculate contemparaniety between the two. > Generally for that sort of thing, people use Julian dates > See: > http://www.aavso.org/observing/aids/aboutjd.shtml > or > http://scienceworld.wolfram.com/astronomy/JulianDate.html