Friday the 7th was a New Moon but Full Moon 3.1 didn’t circle the date! I assumed the moon’s cycle is less wobbly than it turns out to be, so now I’ve got a real moon phase calculation based on Jean Meeus’ Astronomical Algorithms book. It correctly circles 2008 March 7th as well as all the other dates I checked.

Download now for Windows Vista

Release Notes

DRAGGING THE GADGET: To move the gadget you must use Microsoft’s drag pad for the gadget, which appears when you hover over the gadget. I don’t know why, but having a flyout on the gadget (the calendar) disables dragging. I’ll keep looking for a solution, but I don’t know how to work around this yet. On user suggested using a double-click instead and that does work, but I don’t like the idea of adding a click to something common like opening the calendar in exchange for making something uncommon like dragging slightly easier. The Calendar gadget that comes with Windows seems to be able to handle both clicks and drags, so I’m going to examine that sometime to see how it’s supposed to be done.

v3.2 Changes

- Uses accurate algorithm for calculating phases instead of simple approximation

v3.1 Changes

- Optional large moon size (off by default)
- Optional sidereal sky map (off by default)

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 9th, 2008 at 2:27 pm and is filed under Astronomy, Downloads, Full Moon, News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.