This article has absolutely nothing to do with iPhemeris software and is simply a side interest. The attached paper is a little thought experiment undertaken to test the Military Abduction (MILAB) assertion, which states that all people reporting having been abducted by aliens are actually being abducted by some government entity as part of some disinformation campaign purportedly to hide the fact that we have some kind of top secret technology. The people making this assertion refer to these as Military Abductions or MILAB. The reasons given for why any government would use the very technology it is trying to hide to conduct highly illegal operations and which are far more likely to have exactly the opposite effect and expose said technology, are never very clear. Personally, this writer has always found the MILAB assertion to be rather illogical not to mention insulting and disrespectful to the thousands of people worldwide who are reporting these extremely traumatic events. I believe the abductees and what they say and know several personally. Also, whilst I am not being abducted, I have encountered aliens personally and directly on two occasions and for me, their existence is not theoretical, it is a personally verified […]

Geek alert! This is a technical article about some of the issues I ran into whilst extending iPhemeris’s Ephemeris to cover a 5000 year period from 2500 BC to 2500 AD. Initially I’d thought it would be a simple matter to add a few thousand more years to the database. Devices have a lot more storage these days and network and download speeds are faster than when iPhemeris was first created. So why not, easy peasy right?! I did the work to read the JPL Ephemeris files and the USNO asteroid ephemeris over 8 years ago (both use the same format to store data) and could easily create what iPhemeris uses in any format. So creating a database that covered a longer period of time was really only a matter of a few days work and given the relative frequency of requests for more data, I thought why not just add it as an In-App purchase. It took only a few hours work to create the new tables and pull in 4 more asteroids/planetoids from the USNO Ephemeris (the more frequently requested ones): Hygiea, Astraea, Eris and Sedna. Then set about updating the various places in the iOS and MacOS versions of the code that […]