The Nautical Almanac

The nautical almanac seems a formidable tome - endless columns and rows of figures. However they are not difficult to understand once one has an idea of how everything works. What the almanac does is show the Greenwich Hour Angle of the prominent stars, planets, sun and moon for every second of the year. Usually there is a fairly detailed description of how to use this data to extract the Local Hour Angle in the almanac itself. I am not going to go into details - suffice to say that the book contains all the data needed to determine a celestial body's position for it's year of publication.