38. Reliability of the TheSky Software

TheSky software employs several routines to compute celestial configurations. Since the exact procedures are a bit of a mystery, the output of the software was validated by comparing it to Tuckerman's Tables, a standard work from the pre-PC computer era.

Contemporary software reduces astronomical computations to a few mouse clicks. The number crunching of former times has been eliminated, but the end results have not changed much. TheSkyís output is in line with the numbers in Tuckermanís Tables and the supplement to the tables. Modern software, for all its radical capabilities, fits within the ongoing evolution of historical astronomy.