Talk:Newcomb's Tables of the Sun

General relativity
From edition 09:41, 17 April 2004 this article contains the statement:

Also, he also did not account for the effects of general relativity which was unknown at the time.

The importance and significance of general relativity for astronomy tends to be strongly exaggerated in many places, especially here in Wikipedia.

I think that the layman gets a false impression of the practical importance of this theory with some authors of astronomy articles insisting on rather undue references to general relativity! Also here I think this sentence should be removed! In reality the physicists that are looking for evidence of "general relativity effects" in astronomy have a difficult stance!

Stamcose (talk) 19:05, 9 June 2011 (UTC)


 * Agreed. The sentence as is gives undue weight to a theory that was future in Newcomb's time, and is of somewhat questionable importance to spaceflight and astronomy even 100 years after Einstein's theory was first published.  I would support removal of the sentence.  Cheers.  N2e (talk) 22:47, 11 July 2011 (UTC)


 * I searched for the phrase "he also did not account for the effects" in the article and those words do not appear. Please state words that actually appear in the article so interested editors can find what you are complaining about. Jc3s5h (talk) 22:55, 11 July 2011 (UTC)


 * I found it by searching for "did not account for the effects". The significance of the error depends on what you are interested in. There were persistent non-random errors in the orbit of Mercury that could not be accounted for by Newton's theory, which was the basis for Newcomb's work. General relativity provided a new theory which did account for the orbit of Mercury, so that was significant from several points of view. On the other hand, if you were navigating a ship or were a surveyor orienting a line on the ground, general relativity and Newton's theory are equally satisfactory. Jc3s5h (talk) 23:32, 11 July 2011 (UTC)

I have been working 36 years as a flight dynamics engineer conceiving, defining and writing software for all kinds of spacecraft project of European Space Agency. Basic software to compute the visibility of a spacecraft from a given point on the Earth always use this formula and these three parameters. Software for orbit determination of spacecraft also use these parameters. Also high accuracy applications are based on Newcomb's formula using UT1 instead of UTC. These parameters are parts of the basic database used by the European Space Operations Center but not very easily found in the literature evailable to a layman. I consider it very valuable that this formula is easily accessible in Wikipedia. Newcomb's Tables of the Sun is something completely different, at its time very important but now only of historical interest.

N2e and Jc3s5h who agreed to remove this article are obviously complete laymans in this field! I hope Jc3s5h will not interfere again! If he does, it is bad for the Wikipedia users! I have done my best to support amateur developers of flight dynamics software but I refuse to wage an Edit war with Jc3s5h. Some people improve Wikipedia, other deteriorate it. Not always by bad will but due to over-estimating their understanding of the subject!

Stamcose (talk) 18:40, 6 November 2011 (UTC)