"Anthra Norell" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > Hi, > > The following are differences of solar declinations from one day to > the next, (never mind the unit). Considering the inertia of a > planet, any progress of (apparent) celestial motion over regular > time intervals has to be highly regular too, meaning that a plot > cannot be jagged. The data I googled out of Her Majesty's Nautical > Almanac are merely nautical precision and that, I suppose, is where > the jitter comes in. There's got to be algorithms out there to iron > it out. If it were a straight line, I could do it. But this, over > the whole year, is a wavy curve, somthing with a dominant sine > component. Suggestions welcome.
The important thing is to have a (mathematical, hopefully) model of how you expect the data to vary with time. Start from there, and then, for example, use regression to fit a curve to the data. The "Numerical Recipes" (Press et al.) book is popular and IMHO is a good place to learn about these things (comes in several language flavours, including Fortran and C -- sadly no Python AFAIK), though the implementations aren't a great choice for serious "production" use, according to those in the know. OTOH, there are quick and dirty methods that don't involve any model worth speaking of -- and Press et al. covers those too :-) John -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
