Sometimes there are things you want to know. It may not be useful to everyone; however, some people may find this page of use. I designed a page that shows the current status of Mercury retrogrades.
At first, I thought that I could build the calculations myself, and learn how to do this all myself. After buying some books on Astronomy and trying for about three weeks to do the calculations in perl. Well, to be honest, it was a lot more difficult than I thought it was going to be.
There was however a solution. Someone had taken one of the books, Astronomy On The Personal Computer by Montenbruck and written it in PERL. This was most useful, as they had already done the work, and translated the PASCAL programs into working PERL code.
I did have to ask for directions, but they were most helpful, and I was up and running in no time. So it didn’t actually take very long to get a working solution if you don’t count the time I spent trying to do the calculations myself.
Here is the link to the page I designed: Mercury Retrograde
This should be a fully functional page with the time in GMT -7 time zone for when the next Mercury retrogrades will be. It should work for as long as my site is up and running. It took a lot of effort to make this work. I was happy to have it done. I really was.
The calculations are provided by Astro::Montenbruck perl module, and the results are stored in a database, which PHP uses to get the date and time. It also shows the current status if Mercury is direct, or in retrograde.
It was a fun project to work on, I learned a lot about it. So head your browser over to the page I made, and check it out. You never know how the next Mercury retrograde is going to be. Sometimes, those can be real pain the ass.
Check the rest of my website out while you are there. Lots of content, and things I’ve been working on for the last year or so. Thanks for reading my blog, and taking the time to check this out. Much appreciated.
Written by: Ctopher Thomas, A Real Misfit
Photo Credit: Image by Bruno Albino from Pixabay