Sherab Ling software
Edward Henning
there was a limitation I had to deal with in the existing calendar
software. One of the oddities in the Sherab Ling system is that for
lunar day data (trigram and the like), the actual Chinese month number
needs to be used. The existing calendar software only gives valid data
for this from about 2006 to 2013.
As the modern Chinese calendar uses accurate astronomy, programming
this is not a trivial task. Also, because accurate astronomy gives
rise to some strange anomalies - such as years with two intercalaries
and one omitted month - various rules have been developed by the
Chinese to smooth out the calendar. So, I have created a lookup table
(in cmonth.h) for the Chinese month numbers for the years 1900 to 2100
inclusive. I think this should be enough for most purposes. Requests
outside of this range set the Chinese month number equal to the
Tibetan - which they are anyway, half of the time.
This produces the same results for the years 2006 ro 2013 as the
previous versions, with one exception. I noticed that when the Chinese
month is 1 and the Tibetan month 12, the Chinese month value was set
to 12. I have changed this, as I presume this was a mistake of mine.
Tenzang, am I correct, or is this something you asked me to do? It
makes a difference, for example, to the lunar day data for the last
month of last year. The files are up on the web site:
http://www.kalacakra.org/calendar/os_slc.htm
Edward.