If you are interested in solar eclipse predictions, this is a software developed in 1997 by Ovidiu Vaduvescu at the Astronomical Institute in Bucharest. You may download it free together with an example for Bucharest, 11 August 1999. It gives the times of contacts, given the ephemeridae of Sun and Moon (apparent topocentric). These data are provided by MICA, courtesy by US Naval Observatory. For more information please contact the author.
The software uses the Moon's radius. The default value used by the program is 1737.3Km, a mean between the recommended values of 1738.09 (for the exterior contacts) and 1736.65 (for the interior contacts). Running the program using the Bucharest's coordinates listed with the referred publication will get the following results:
| All times in UT |
Espenak & Anderson |
Ovidiu |
| First Contact |
9:41:24.9 | 24.0 |
| Second Contact |
11:05:47.7 | 47.0 |
| Third Contact |
11:08:10.0 | 9.0 |
| Fourth Contact |
12:28:43.6 | 43.0 |
| Eclipse's Maximum |
11:06:58.9 | 57.0 |
Of course, to have a precision of 0.1s we should get the ephemeridae using a step of 0.1s. Nevertheless, this would be superflue, because of the topography of the Moon.
References:
Total Solar Eclipse of 1999 August 11 - Fred Espenak and Jay Anderson, NASA Reference Publication 1398, March 1997;
MICA (Multiyear Interactiv Computer Almanac, v.1.0b3 or more), US Naval Observatory.
Turbo C++ v.1.0, Borland International, 1990.